PostgreSQL Archives - Brent Ozar Unlimited®

How to Download the Stack Overflow Database for Postgres

August 26, 2026

You wanna learn PostgreSQL, and you wanna use a sample database with big real-world data, the same kinds of issues that pop up with real-life data distribution skew, and fun query challenges.

StackOverflow.com provides a free data dump in XML format with their data as of 2024-04. The data is licensed under cc-by-sa 4.0, which means whenever you use it for public demos, you'll need to link back to their original data source there, just as I did.

What SQL Server People Should Know About Amazon Aurora Serverless

April 6, 2023

You, dear reader, are most likely a Microsoft SQL Server user - either a DBA or developer.

Set your pencil down for a second because you're not going to learn about a Microsoft product today, nor are you going to learn something that is going to be immediately useful to you in your job. Today, I'm writing about a completely different product just to give you a better insight on what else is out there.

Performance Tuning

Building SQL ConstantCare: Let’s Tune an Index in Postgres.

January 20, 2020

This week, our SQL ConstantCare® back end services started having some query timeout issues. Hey, we're database people - we can do this, right? Granted, I work with Microsoft SQL Server most of the time, but we host our data in Amazon Aurora Postgres - is a query just a query and an index just…

Two Important Differences Between SQL Server and PostgreSQL

August 6, 2018

SQL ConstantCare® uses PostgreSQL as a back end - specifically, AWS RDS Aurora - so I've spent a lot of time writing Postgres queries lately. Here are some of the things I've noticed that are different. CTEs are optimization fences. In SQL Server, if you write this query: [crayon-6aab3e2d9856a579467369/] SQL Server builds a query plan for…