Pg_alastair on Percona Community

A reponsible role for AI in Open Source projects?

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0000

AI-driven pressure on open source maintainers, reviewers and, even, contributors, has been very much in the news lately. Nobody needs another set of edited highlights on the theme from me. For a Postgres-specific view, and insight on how low quality AI outputs affect contributors, Tomas Vondra published a great post on his blog recently, which referenced an interesting talk by Robert Haas at PGConf.dev in Montreal last year. I won’t rehash the content here, they’re both quite quick reads and well worth the time.

PostgreSQL coffee break: version upgrade related reindexing - reasons

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

During FOSDEM I had a chance to join a presentation by Alexander Sosna of GitLab on the backup procedure he has followed with his team to decrease the downtime during major upgrades. I highly recommend the talk, definitely worth watching!

I loved the presentation, especially since a similar procedure is what we recommend our users as well. Unfortunately it’s not for everyone: it’s applicable ONLY when you can stop DDL operations on your database cluster for some time. As you can imagine that’s not a case for every deployment.

A thread through my 2025 Postgres events

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 07:00:00 +0000

I recently got back from PostgreSQL Conference Europe in Riga, marking the end of my conference activities for 2025. The speakers were great. The audience, for the Extensions Showcase on Community Day on Tuesday and my Kubernetes from the database out talk, were great. The event team was great. The singing at karaoke was terrible, but it’s supposed to be.

After attending a good few events this year, starting with CERN PGDay in mid-January, I wanted to write something about more than just the most recent event. I see a common thread across presentations and sessions at a number of events over the year, that is, scale-out Postgres and particularly, its use in non-profit scientific environments.