WARNING: Reading this post may cause a little jolt of anxiety every time you cancel a query with CTRL+C in psql.
George MacKerron is back with another deep dive into one of Postgres’s strangest corners. neon.com/blog/ctrl-c-...
🚀 My guest post for the Neon blog just went live!
Want to make Postgres integration testing dead simple? Read on:
neon.com/blog/neon-te...
Big thanks to @andrelandgraf.com, Carlota Soto and Neon for the support!
We're excited to sponsor Sync Conf 2025! Join us in SF on Nov 12th!
We wrote up more about TanStack DB with ElectricSQL here: neon.com/blog/tanstac...
TanStack DB adds optimistic updates on top, making your UIs feel snappy, not just for GET requests, but also when mutating data from the UI.
ElectricSQL moves state synchronization into a dedicated service, greatly simplifying backend complexity. Instead of managing WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, or polling connections yourself, the ElectricSQL server handles the client updates for you.
Whenever an agent, background task, or webhook function mutates the database, the changes instantly propagate to all connected client devices, and the associated UIs update in real time.
This is fantastic not only for multiplayer or multi-device flows, but also when working with background AI agents and third-party services like Stripe triggering webhooks.
It's magical when you update a row in your db and connected UIs instantly update. Real-time UI isn’t a new concept, but sync engines like ElectricSQL turn Postgres into the source of truth for the sync, simplifying the mental model needed to build reactive updates - just write to the database!
TanStack DB with Sync provides an exciting new way to add end-to-end reactivity to your web applications, including optimistic UI updates. 🧵
Build Open Source with Postgres. Neon is proud to be part of
@vercel.com's Open Source Program 🫡
These are systems-level changes that make a real difference, although we still have work to do.
Read the full engineering writeup here: neon.com/blog/recent-...
7/ Better sharding policy
We now shard earlier and more gradually: 4 shards at 16 GB, 16 at 2 TB. This improved ingest performance by 17.5% for mid-size tenants.
More info on sharding: neon.com/blog/how-we-...
6/ Parallel S3 uploads
Uploads no longer block layer writes. Upload throughput doubled, and ingest time in our benchmarks dropped.
5/ Smarter compaction
We now prioritize L0 compaction to avoid read amplification during ingestion. This dropped p99 read amplification by >50%.
4/ Scan prefetching
Instead of fetching one page at a time, Pageservers now prefetch up to 100. In our benchmarks, schema finalization dropped from 10h to 2.5h.
3/ Faster disk writes
Safekeepers now use sparse files and fewer flushes. WAL write throughput improved by 230%.
2/ WAL compression
WAL is now compressed with Zstd before it’s sent to Pageservers. This cut Safekeeper → Pageserver bandwidth by ~70%.
1/ Sharded ingest
We stopped broadcasting WAL to all shards and now route writes only where they’re needed. Less network traffic, lower CPU, and ~2× faster ingestion for large tenants.
In the last few months, we've been working on making Neon storage faster.
Here are 7 improvements we shipped to boost performance under the hood 🧵
Interesting to see @neon.tech having dedicated docs for integrating with AI tooling, including context prompts for how to leverage their stack neon.tech/docs/ai/ai-a...
one-click @neon.com MCP server install straight from the docs 👉 neon.com/docs/ai/neon...
I haven't been hoarding MCPs like most folks in this platform, but if this pattern catches up, I might end up starting to
🖱️☝️ 🤖🔥
Generate a CMS and admin panel with a Notion-style editor, file uploads, and more - straight from your Postgres schema. getflashboard.com made it happen.
Read how to use Flashboard with Neon: neon.com/blog/generat...
"Your API is not an MCP." - Learn from David Gomes why designing your MCP toolkit takes more than just exposing an API.
David leads the development of Neon's MCP server and shared key lessons at Microsoft Build 2025. Watch the talk here: build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessio...
To finish up, here’s a demo: fyi.neon.tech/pgsearch
Search over 50 million records using pg_search and Neon!
pg_search is already available for all Neon databases in AWS regions using Postgres 17. If you’re in Azure or using other versions of Postgres, don’t worry, we’ll get to you shortly.
To install the extension, run:
The table above is only a summary of the benchmark results. You have the full thing here (scroll down):
neon.tech/blog/pgsearc...
We tested pg_search in Neon and full-text search queries were up to 1,000x faster than Postgres' native full-text search:
- COUNT(*) with search: 22,214ms → 770ms: 29x faster
- Top-N ranked search: 38,797ms → 81ms: 497x faster
- Filtered search: 31,890ms → 29ms: 1,100x faster
pg_search fixes all of this:
- Uses a Rust-powered Tantivy index instead of GIN
- Implements BM25 ranking, same as Elastic
- Supports prefix search, typo tolerance, JSON-aware search
- With real-time updates, no manual reindexing
