pgBackRest Is Dead? | Scaling Postgres 415
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pgBackRest, widely considered the best PostgreSQL backup and restore tool, was archived by its sole maintainer David Steel on April 27th after 13 years of development. The project lost its corporate sponsor when Crunchy Data was acquired, and Steel could not secure alternative funding. The episode curates multiple community responses covering: alternatives like Barman, WAL-G, and pg_basebackup+pg_combinebackup (Postgres 17+); Percona's commitment to continue supporting pgBackRest; broader discussions on open source sustainability and the need for foundation-level governance (citing CNCF's model with CloudNativePG); and the unique copyright structure of PostgreSQL itself. Additional topics include queries for monitoring autovacuum, a new pg_wait_tracer tool for nanosecond-precision wait event tracing, parallel autovacuum coming in Postgres 19 (with caveats about IO-bound workloads), row-level security performance pitfalls, and HOT updates in Postgres.