Goodbye 2019, Hello 2020

It's the holidays. Time for reflection, and a good time for gratitude, too. And so we send a heartfelt thank you to all of you in the Citus & Postgres communities—for all your support, ideas, recommendations, downloads, tweets, usage... for ALL THE THINGS. Here’s to a wonderful 2020!

PgDay San Francisco is right around the corner

On January 21, 2020, Magnus Hagander will keynote the 1-day, single-track event with a talk all about the Postgres community, followed by 7 more technical talks at all levels. Our own Lukas Fittl is giving a talk on “A Map for Monitoring PostgreSQL”. Several Citans & Azure Postgres folks will also be at the event. (We are a Premiere sponsor, too.) Get your ticket before they sell out, and come say hello to all the Postgres people.
Get your PgDaySF ticket now → 

ICYMI: Citus now GA on Microsoft Azure

The Citus team at Microsoft has worked really hard to bring Citus to Azure—and drum roll please—as of early November, Citus is now generally available as a built-in deployment option in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Woot! Hyperscale (Citus) transforms your Postgres database into a database that you can not only scale up and down, but also scale out horizontally.
More on Hyperscale (Citus)... → 

Postgres Connection Strings and psql

PostgreSQL connection strings embedded in your application can take two different forms: the key-value notation or the postgresql:// URI scheme. When it comes to using psql though, another form of connection string is introduced. In this short article you will learn that you can use any of the three different forms in psql and thus easily copy & paste your application connection string right at the console to test it. Easy peasy.
Read Dimitri’s post → 

Introducing Azure Active Directory authentication for Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Published on our Azure Postgres blog (aka.ms/azure-postgres-blog), Lukas Fittl writes about Azure Active Directory. We all care about securing access to our data. When using different kinds of databases, managed by different teams, it can be difficult to ensure consistency across your data estate. To help solve this problem, we announced the Preview of Azure Active Directory integration for Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
Read Lukas’s post... → 

An Interview on what makes Postgres unique: Extensions

A little over a year ago, our teammate Dimitri Fontaine asked if he could interview Craig Kerstiens as fodder for the book Dimitri was working on (and has since published): “The Art of PostgreSQL”. Here is an excerpt of that interview, published on Craig’s blog. Spoiler alert: Postgres extensions are discussed. Read on for the deets, and a discount code for the whole book. Sweet.
Read the interview → 

Database sharding explained in plain English

In building Citus, we’ve picked up a thing or two about sharding. And our engineers are often asked to walk people through what sharding is, and how it works. This is a super popular blog post that we recently republished on the Azure Postgres blog (aka.ms/azure-postgres-blog). Here’s how Craig explains sharding. In plain English.
More about database sharding → 

When Postgres blocks: 7 tips for dealing with locks

One of our all-time favorite blog posts, we just had to include it in this end-of-the-year Citus newsletter. Some useful tips from Postgres engineer Marco Slot for dealing with Postgres locks. We picked up these tips when collaborating with users who migrated from single node Postgres to Citus—and with users who were building operational real-time analytics apps on Citus.
Read the 7 tips from Marco → 

Self-managed or fully-managed. That is the question.

A guest blogger on the Azure Postgres blog wrote this compare-and-contrast article on the pros and cons of managing your Postgres database yourself vs. using a fully-managed database as a service in the cloud—on Azure, AWS, or GCP. If you’re trying to make that decision, this post just might help.
Self-managed or fully-managed? →