Category: RDS for PostgreSQL

When you restore an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance from a snapshot, the Amazon EBS volume hydrates lazily, so early queries can run 10x to 15x slower. This post walks through PostgreSQL-native prewarming techniques (pg_prewarm, VACUUM ANALYZE, and full table scans) and new monitoring fields to restore predictable performance faster after restore.

AWS today announced the general availability of AMD-based R8a and M8a database instances for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS, powered by 5th generation AMD EPYC processors. R8a is a memory-optimized instance family available on both Aurora and RDS. M8a is a general-purpose instance family available on RDS.

Replication lag during a change data capture (CDC) migration can be counterintuitive: the source is busy, yet replication falls behind and WAL piles up. This post shows how to resolve PostgreSQL replication lag with heartbeat tables using AWS DMS or Debezium, and how to monitor replication slot health with Amazon CloudWatch and SQL diagnostics.

In this post, we show you how to build a fully managed, event-driven change data capture (CDC) pipeline. It streams row-level changes from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL to Amazon S3 in near real time. You deploy the entire pipeline with a single AWS CloudFormation template, and it can run in private subnets with no internet gateway without exposing resources to the public internet.

SQL Server stored procedures can return multiple result sets from one call, but PostgreSQL cannot. This post presents two PostgreSQL-native alternatives to refcursors, session-scoped temporary tables and JSON aggregation, compares both against a refcursor baseline, and shows how to implement and validate each in .NET and Npgsql.

Part 1 showed how row lock contention degrades Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL throughput. In Part 2, use Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights and its Lock Tree to pinpoint blocking sessions, then resolve contention with query termination, timeout parameters, and architectural patterns such as SKIP LOCKED and row splitting that restore throughput.

Row lock contention can collapse database throughput during a flash sale even when CPU and I/O look healthy. In Part 1 of this series, learn how PostgreSQL row locking works and how to monitor lock contention in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using system views, the pgrowlocks extension, and the log_lock_waits parameter.

Circular role dependencies can stall or roll back a major version upgrade of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL when you move from PostgreSQL 14 or earlier to 15 or later. Learn why this happens, how to detect it with a single pre-upgrade query, and how to clear it before you upgrade.

Migrating full-text search from SQL Server to PostgreSQL can silently change results because the engines handle text, linguistics, and accents differently. This post shows how to reproduce SQL Server full-text search on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, covering collation, tokenization, accent-insensitive search, and synonyms.

PostgreSQL out-of-memory (OOM) events and excessive disk spilling are among the most common production incidents on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Learn how PostgreSQL allocates and consumes memory, how to identify memory-intensive queries, and how to diagnose, prevent, and recover from OOM events on both engines.