An excellent snapshot of how PostgreSQL has changed over versions features-wise is available at http://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/. Applying filters in Versions 8.0, 9.0, and 9.4 gives us a good idea about how quickly features are getting added to the database.
Each version of PostgreSQL adds many features grouped into different categories (such as performance, backend, data types, and so on). We will look at a few features that are more likely to be of interest (because they help us improve performance or they make maintenance and configuration easy).
As we saw earlier, reads from disk have a significant overhead compared to those from memory. There are quite a few occasions when disk reads are unavoidable. Let's see a few examples.
In a data warehouse, the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process, which may happen once a day usually, involves a lot of raw data getting processed in memory before being loaded into...