As 2020 finally draws to a close, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look and highlight some of the most popular PostgreSQL links of 2020.

As such, here’s a list of the top ten links shared in Postgres Weekly, an email newsletter reaching over 15,000 PG fans.

🐘 The top ten PostgreSQL links of 2020:

How One Word Unlocked a 9x Performance Improvement

The creator of a personal finance tool experienced a user whose data caused a flood of INSERTs large enough to cause a problem. Here’s the tale of how a simple RETURNING clause enabled a huge optimization in the process.

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10 Things I Hate About Postgres

Earlier in the year we shared an upbeat ‘Postgres is the world’s best database’ item in the newsletter, but it seems readers like to take the rough with the smooth and clicked a lot more on this item instead ;-) Rick reminds us that no software is perfect and that even Postgres has flaws. 🤭

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Postgres Pagination Approaches

Most webapp users don’t want to see a list of thousands of items at once, so pagination is often adopted as a way to ‘page’ through a larger group of items in more manageable chunks. There are several ways to achieve this with Postgres with various tradeoffs.

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Postgres 13 Incompatibilities To Be Be Aware Of

Postgres 13 was released this year and while Postgres tends to be reasonably backward compatible over time, there are some changes worth being aware of before making a move, if you haven’t yet.

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How Does Postgres Fare on the Arm-Based M1 MacBook Pro?

Apple has begun to roll out machines using its own Arm-based M1 CPUs and the initial performance improvements have been impressive. But while macOS runs faster than ever, what about Postgres? Spoiler alert.. WOW!

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A SQL Style Guide

Want to ensure you have legible and maintainable queries? This handy SQL style guide from Simon Holywell remains a valuable resource.

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The Best Medium-Hard Data Analyst SQL Interview Questions

This article begins with a quote: “The first 70% of SQL is pretty straightforward but the remaining 30% can be pretty tricky.” True! This popular article focuses on the tricky ‘medium-hard’ area that few tutorials venture into.

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Recursive SQL Queries with PostgreSQL

This post from March explores the lesser-known Common Table Expression SQL feature — which makes it possible to write recursive queries.

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Seven Best Practice Tips for PostgreSQL Bulk Data Loading

Anyone who’s managed a database has needed to import a large quantity of data at some point, and anyone who’s tried this has rapidly discovered there are both fast and slow ways to do it. 😉 This post from Sadequl Hussain looks at some some best practices for bulk importing data into Postgres databases.

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Comparing Binary Data Performance in Postgres

You can store large binary blogs outside your database and reference them, store them as ’large objects’, or use bytea byte arrays. How do they compare? Laurenz Albe outlines why this is an important thing to consider if you do have binary blobs flying around in your data model.

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