My Postgres partitioning cookbook | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026

Avoid years of partitioning mistakes in Postgres. Derk van Veen (Adyen) shares lessons in his talk “My Postgres partitioning cookbook” at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026. Abstract: Over the last three years, I have tried every single thing I could think of with Postgres partitions, and I made many mistakes. Most of them on my laptop; some lessons were a bit more painful. I've seen my fair share of performance problems and converted inheritance-based partitions to native and back. I've created many default partitions and by now managed to almost drop all of them. In this session, I want to go over all my lessons learned, especially the ones that surprised me the most. I will cover the basics about index and foreign key creations and implicit inheritance. And how the foreign keys caused catalog corruptions because of cleaning up data. I will discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of the default partition and leave it to you to judge them as a blessing or a curse. An important part of working with Postgres partitions is cheating with the catalog. When I proposed this to my team the first time, everybody was nervous about it, as they should have been, but these days we do it without thinking. It is bad practice, but sometimes it is just the only way to get things done. This presentation will show you the basics but also shows the pitfalls (mines) and obvious mistakes you can easily avoid. Derk van Veen is a database specialist at Adyen. Adyen has some very large PostgreSQL databases under continuous high pressure. An important part of Derk’s job is to find creative solutions for tough problems. Whenever he, or his team, finds interesting solutions he tries to share the lessons learned with the PostgreSQL community. ► Video chapters: ⏩ 00:00 – Music & introduction ⏩ 02:28 – Why large tables need partitioning ⏩ 04:42 – Why range partitioning wins ⏩ 05:52 – Time and integer partitioning examples ⏩ 07:02 – The hidden risks of default partitions ⏩ 08:29 – How defaul