Dave's PostgreSQL Stuff

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...

  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...