MinhVo

Minh Vo

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Slaying code & making it lit fr fr 🔥 tagline

Hey there 👋 I'm an AI Engineer with 7 years of experience building scalable web and mobile applications. Currently at Neurond AI (May 2025 — present), architecting an Enterprise AI Assistant Platform with multi-tenant RAG on pgvector, multi-provider LLM orchestration, and Azure-native infrastructure. Previously spent 5+ years at SNAPTEC (Sep 2019 — Apr 2025), leading SaaS themes, admin dashboards, and e-commerce platforms — earned the Hero of the Year award in 2021. I specialize in TypeScript, React, Next.js, and AI-Native engineering with Claude Code and Cursor.bio

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PostgreSQL 17 New Features Performance and Advanced Usage

PostgreSQL 17 new features: incremental backup, JSON_TABLE, MERGE improvements, logical replication, performance gains.

PostgreSQL 17databaseSQLperformanceJSONlogical replication

By MinhVo

Introduction

Released September 2024 with incremental backup, JSON_TABLE, MERGE with RETURNING, enhanced logical replication, and performance improvements. Handles transactional, analytical, full-text search, geospatial, and JSON in one system. Vacuum 20% faster, better query planning, optimized memory management.

PostgreSQL 17 Overview

database illustration

Released September 2024 with incremental backup, JSON_TABLE, MERGE with RETURNING, enhanced logical replication, and performance improvements. Handles transactional, analytical, full-text search, geospatial, and JSON in one system. Vacuum 20% faster, better query planning, optimized memory management.

Incremental Backup

Native incremental backup via pg_basebackup --incremental. pg_combinebackup combines full + incremental for restoration. Strategies like weekly full + daily incremental reduce storage 50-80%. PITR works with incremental backups: restore full, apply increments, replay WAL.

JSON_TABLE and MERGE

JSON_TABLE converts JSON to relational rows and columns per SQL/JSON standard. Eliminates application-level JSON parsing. Supports nested paths, DEFAULT values, error handling. MERGE enhanced with RETURNING clause: returns all affected rows with merge_action function indicating operation type.

Logical Replication Upgrades

database illustration

Supports logical replication across major versions for zero-downtime upgrades. Process: set up replication old to new, let catch up, switch applications. Improvements: sequence replication, better DDL handling, improved conflict resolution. pg_upgrade supports copy-file-transfer for faster upgrades.

Performance Improvements

Vacuum 20% faster with improved visibility map. Better multi-column statistics and join ordering. B-tree index maintenance faster. BRIN indexes with more summarization. Parallel vacuum, parallel index creation for partitions, parallel hash joins. 5-15% overall improvement for typical workloads.

Advanced Patterns and Operations

Automatic partition creation, better pruning, improved partition-wise joins. Extensions: pgvector for AI embeddings, TimescaleDB for time-series, PostGIS for geospatial. Monitoring: pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_activity. Tuning: shared_buffers 25% RAM, effective_cache_size 75% RAM. Security: SSL/TLS, row-level security, pgAudit.

Conclusion

The topics covered in this article represent important developments in modern software engineering. By understanding these concepts deeply and applying them in your projects, you can build more robust, scalable, and maintainable systems. Continue exploring, experimenting, and building — the technology landscape rewards those who stay curious and keep learning.