Weeknotes 2026.04

I worked the complete last week from home. The reason was a cold and that didn't want to infect anyone at the office.

And I am a person who thinks, if you could stay at home, stay at home with a cold. But there are always some people who think everyone should have the joy of seeing them fighting their cold in the office.

I had some trouble with FreeIPA this week. When I opened the FreeIPA web interface, no users or groups were listed. Apache Directory Studio didn't list any users or groups as well. So I got a little bit nervous.

After some debugging, I found the problem and was finally able to fix it. It was a relief to see all the users and groups again.

This week a lot of interesting things in the world of data happened. A new managed Postgres service was announced. I already stopped counting those services because there are already a lot of them in the wild. People can choose their Postgres provider, although I am not sure how many actually will survive.

Content:

• Story of the week
• Postgres and the world of data
• Security and Privacy
• AI
• Around the world

Story of the week

Kaarel Moppel has written a nice blog post about the way he figured out when a table was changed. He used pg_waldump and track_commit_timestamp to solve his problem.

CSI: Postgres — Did someone change my table??

Postgres and the world of data

Speeding up Postgres

Haki Benita has published creative ideas to speed up Postgres. He presents some unconventional optimization ideas.

Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations

OpenAI and Postgres

The OpenAI engineering team shared their story of scaling Postgres for their 800 million Users. I would say they use nothing special. They use one single primary Postgres server and 50 read replicas. Furthermore, PgBouncer is used for connection pooling.

Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users

Contributions 2025

Robert Haas has written his yearly blog post where he lists the contributors to Postgres.

66% of the new lines of code where contributed by one of 26 people, and 90% of the lines of new code were contributed by one of 67 people.

Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2025?

Clickhouse and Postgres

In partnership with Ubicloud, Clickhouse announced a new managed Postgres service. Of course, the connection to Clickhouse via pg_clickhouse is available by default.

• ClickHouse PostgreSQL powered by Ubicloud
• Fast, scalable, enterprise-grade Postgres natively integrated with ClickHouse

MySQL

Otto Kekäläinen has written a blog post about why people should stop using MySQL. He mentions the declining commitment of Oracle to support open-source MySQL and their focus on their closed-sources cloud product Heatwave.

Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source

Postgres Release Monitor

• pgmetrics 1.19 released
• pgBackRest 2.58.0 Released
• pgmoneta 0.20
• Send Emails like Oracle UTL_SMTP using pg_utl_smtp for PostgreSQL

Security and Privacy

Digital Sovereignty

The Radboud University announced that Fairphone will be their new standard smartphone for employees.

Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees

And derStandard published an article about a Gesellschaft für Informatik and their calls for a change of direction in government IT:

Kurswechsel: Europa soll US-Tech von kritischer Infrastruktur ausschließen

VoidLink

Last week I mentioned the Linux malware VoidLink. This week Check Point Research has a nice write-up about the malware and they claim that they found evidence that malware is almost entirely authored by AI.

VoidLink: Evidence That the Era of Advanced AI-Generated Malware Has Begun

cURL

I already mentioned a couple of times that the cURL project has problems with AI slop. Now they announced that they are stopping the bug bounty program and updatet their security.txt file:

We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.

Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure “intact mental health”

Mullvad

Mullvad has completed another security audit. The audit found 5 security-relevant issues: two low‑severity and three medium‑severity.

New security audit of account and payment services

Data breach ticker

• Data leak: 72 million records from Under Armour leaked

AI

Spam

David Bushell has written about his problems opting out in the era of AI.

Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested.

Proton Spam and the AI Consent Problem

Personal Intelligence

10 days ago Google announced Personal Intelligence. Personal Intelligence connects the data of all Google Apps and helps Gemini to become even more personalized.

Personal Intelligence

Around the world

Gladys West

A lovely german article about Gladys West. This article was published by the Austrian derStandard and is a hommage to the incredible Gladys West, the woman behind the GPS system.

Gladys West: Die "unerkannte" Forscherin hinter dem GPS-System ist tot

Renewables are on the rise

Good news for Europe:

Last year, for the first time, wind and solar supplied more power than fossil fuels to the E.U., according to a new analysis.

In Europe, Wind and Solar Power Overtakes Fossil Fuels