Postgres and Open Source Experts

Amid life's many demands, what truly matters? Inspired by her sister‑in‑law’s final words—"It is well"—Amanda Nystrom invites us to define what it means to live without regret.

PostgreSQL’s autovacuum is a silent guardian until it fails. In this final post of our autovacuum series, we tackle two often-overlooked scenarios that can lead to database downtime: temp tables in multi-database clusters and lingering sessions with temp tables. Learn practical prevention tactics and monitoring strategies to keep your cluster safe from XID wraparound and emergency shutdowns.

I was on the phone with one of my most active clients at Command Prompt when I had to interrupt the call because my dogs somehow opened the bus door and went running after horses. The client and Command Prompt have a good relationship so I wasn’t too worried about the fallout. However, what the client said when I returned to the call and explained the interruption was surprising.

“I …

Even in single-database setups, temp tables can quietly lead to major problems. In this post, we break down how long-lived temp tables contribute to XID wraparound risk, why PostgreSQL shuts down to protect against it, and what proactive steps you can take to avoid unexpected downtime.

What is the weight of your footprint?

What is the cost of your footprint?

One of the most surprising things I experience when I go from a house to a school bus is the sheer amount of waste we as humans produce. From packaging to paper towels to food scraps to everything else I won’t mention here, it’s a lot. When I am stationary at home, my trash hides …

Part 4 of our PostgreSQL Autovacuum Failure Series explores how session-level temp tables in RDS can silently stall autovacuum—and how we resolved it. Learn why monitoring and visibility are critical in managed cloud environments.

PgManage 1.3 is here with major updates including a redesigned dashboard UI, JSON export, code folding, PostgreSQL 17 support, and more. This release focuses on usability, performance, and cross-database compatibility, enhancing your workflow whether you're using PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, or others.

Series Summary: This is Part 3 of a multi-part series on PostgreSQL autovacuum failures.

In Part 2, we reproduced the autovacuum failure issue — now let’s understand why it happens. This post dives into PostgreSQL internals, explaining how autovacuum allocates its resources and why certain databases get “stuck” in maintenance limbo.

Why Does This Occur?

This behavior stems from how the autovacuum daemon allocates its resources. Autovacuum identifies …

How many things do you own? How many things are you responsible for?

Every thing we have comes with a cost beyond the purchase price. From maintenance to cleaning to relocating to using: we are required to do much more with our things than we usually think about. Let’s consider a lawn mower: it has the original purchase price, the sales tax if applicable, the time to transport, the space …

Series Summary: This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on PostgreSQL autovacuum failures.

In Part 1, we introduced the scenario where autovacuum mysteriously halts in a multi-database PostgreSQL cluster. Now, we’ll reproduce the issue using a lightweight test setup. This walkthrough will help you see the failure in action and understand how quickly your system can degrade.

How to Reproduce the Problem (and Watch PostgreSQL Go Sideways)

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