For most of PostgreSQL’s history, the official community position on query hints has been a polite version of “no, and stop asking.” The position isn’t subtle. The PostgreSQL wiki maintains a page titled Not Worth Doing, and “Oracle-style…
Every 1 KB insert in Postgres becomes ~2.5 KB of committed I/O before it's done. Here's where the multiplier comes from, and where the tuning knobs run out.
On a PostgreSQL build with assertions enabled, run the standard make check-world suite with a small debugging extension called pg_pathcheck loaded. It will report on pointers to freed memory in the planner's path lists. Such dangling…
We begin at allow_alter_system, which is both new and politically fraught — so let’s start with a fight. ALTER SYSTEM was added in 9.4 as a quality-of-life improvement: set GUCs from an SQL prompt, have the values written into…