Weeknotes 2026.18

What a week. I upgraded to Fedora 43. Fedora supports the last two versions, and Fedora 44 was released this week. Somehow I managed that I am always a little behind.

Anyway. After the upgrade, the graphical userinterface didn't work anymore. And the home directory was not mounted anymore.

It took some time to fix that. Glad that I now have 6 months till I need to upgrade again ;-)

Content:

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

Story of the week

This week's story is a sad one. David Steele announced that he will discontinue pgBackRest. There are a lot of comments about the situation.

• Why the cycle of open-source sustainability needs to be virtuous
• PostgreSQL Ecosystem Problems
• pgBackRest is dead. Now what?
• Notice of Obsolescence
• After pgBackRest
• pgBackRest is archived, what now?
• Open source doesn’t die. It gets unfunded.

Postgres and the world of data

Postgres Internals

Two articles about the internals of Postgres. One is about Bitmap Heap Scans and the other one about HOT-Updates:

• Understanding Bitmap Heap Scans in PostgreSQL
• HOT Updates in Postgres

Postgres Benchmark

Peter Kraft looked at how many writes a single Postgres instance can handle at DBOS.

Does Postgres Scale?

Databases in the era of AI

Arpit Bhayani wrote about the challenges of databases with agentic AI.

Databases Were Not Designed For This

Postgres Release Monitor

• pgclone 4.0.0 released
• pgexporter 0.8
• pgmoneta 0.21
• pgagroal 2.1

Security and Privacy

CopyFail

A security vulnerability in the Linux kernel was discovered. The biggest problem with the vulnerability was, that it was made public before the Linux distributions could roll out Kernelupdates.

• The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed
• Copy Fail: Universal Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

Cybersecurity firm got breached

The company Trellix announced that they suffered a breach where an unauthorized actor accessed parts of their source code.

Trellix Confirms Source Code Breach With Unauthorized Repository Access

Data breach ticker

• Moldova’s health insurance agency reports possible data leak after cyberattack
• Medtronic confirms breach after hackers claim 9 million records theft
• American utility firm Itron discloses breach of internal IT network
• Video site Vimeo blames security incident on Anodot breach
• Instructure confirms data breach, ShinyHunters claims attack

AI

Divorce

At least somehow. The exclusive partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft came to an end.

OpenAI ends its exclusive partnership with Microsoft

Around the world

Fedora 44 released

This week Fedora 44 was released.

Fedora Linux 44 has been released