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PostgreSQL, Timezones, and DBeaver

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Time zones are an unfortunately complex subject when dealing with PostgreSQL. You may be running your local time zone on your on-premises server or on your own laptop. Or you may be using the time zone of your server’s physical location. And you may have set all your servers to UTC. And all are valid approaches, depending on your circumstances. DBeaver users know it is a very advanced tool for database work. But it is easy to get into time zone issues, as the default time zone for your session is taken from your client machine. But this can be adjusted. UTC? UTC or Universal Time Coordinated is a time zone standard used as a basis for all time zones worldwide. It is a constant time scale and does not change for Daylight Saving Time (DST). The benefits include streamlined cross-region data synchronization, easier debugging, accurate time-based transaction ordering, and scalability for global applications. In distributed systems, storing data in UTC ensures that logs and transactions ar...
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Postgres Conference 2026

  Postgres Conference 2026  was held in San Jose, California, and once again, I was lucky to be invited to speak. This is a great show for the 'hallway track' where you talk to members of the community and discover many interesting things. I had a brief conversation with two early contributors to the original PostgreSQL project. One said he was surprised by how much of his code was still in the code base after FORTY YEARS.  AI and MCP are fully interlaced in many projects.  The one that struck me the most was PgEdge's AI DBA Workbench . It features three tiers of detection and an agentic AI assistant to watch it all. I was talking with CEO David Mitchell about it and told him about my past frustrations with Percona's PMM. He then told me author of the AI DBA Workbench also wrote PMM. And PgAdmin4.  Observability seems to be the hot, underlying theme this year. Take a look at pg_collector . It is an SQL script that gathers valuable database information and consol...
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Is the future of MySQL PostgreSQL (Or MariaDB, or TiDB, or ...)?

 I am not intentionally trying to upset anyone with this blog post or minimize the efforts of many brilliant people whom I admire. However, I connected with several people over the 2025 holidays who all had the same question: What is the future of MySQL? At the upcoming FOSDEM conference, several events will discuss this subject and push a particular solution.  And in several ways, they are all wrong. Oracle has not been improving the community edition for a long time now. They have laid off many of their top performers in the MySQL group. We got almost a good decade and a half out of Oracle's stewardship of the "world's most popular database", and we should be thankful for that. However, now that time is over, it is time to consider future options that will involve no updates, CVEs, or innovation for what is the MySQL Community Edition. There are several choices available. Nothing! The first choice is nothing. Many folks run old, end-of-life versions of MySQL. There ...
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DBeaver's Visual Query Builder

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 Quick! You need to create a complex query, but you don't remember how to join the tables. And you need to get it done ASAP. You are in luck if you have an enterprise edition of DBeaver handy.  You can drag and drop the tables and then adjust the clauses as needed without having to dig into the table definitions. 1. Open the database  The PostgreSQL DVD Rental database.  I am using the PostgreSQL DVDRental dataset for these examples. I have opened the connection and listed the tables. As you can see, the database contains numerous tables.  We are going to build a query visually to get information about the customers. 2. Open a SQL Console  Open SQL Console The second step requires an SQL Console. You will find it under the SQL Editor tab. 3. Select Builder  On the right side, Select Builder On the right side of the console pane, tilted 90 degrees, is a tab labeled Builder.  4. You are ready to drag and drop tables   The Query Builder Is Read...
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