August 2026 Summaries

pg_stat_statements is a PostgreSQL extension for identifying database cost centers by aggregating structurally similar queries into fingerprints and tracking their cumulative execution, planning, row, and buffer statistics. The discussion emphasizes ranking queries by total resource use rather than individual latency, since frequent millisecond-scale queries can consume more capacity than occasional slow reports. It explains how to enable the extension with shared preload settings, reset accumulated counters for meaningful measurement, and interpret metrics such as calls, total_exec_time, mean_exec_time, total_plan_time, cache hits, and block reads. A sample workload shows a reporting query dominating execution time through broad disk-heavy scans, while a seemingly fast partitioned-table lookup consumes most server planning time because a stable now() expression prevents plan-time partition pruning. Suggested remedies include passing fixed timestamps, using prepared statements, adjusting partition design, batching or caching high-frequency calls, and considering rollups or columnar storage for recurring large scans. The text also notes limitations including normalized values masking parameter-specific behavior, lack of percentiles and stored plans, entry eviction, incomplete accounting for DELETE-related vacuum work, and differences across PostgreSQL versions.

ControlCom Connect is a vendor-neutral industrial IoT platform from ControlCom Technologies that integrates telemetry from facility equipment, including PLCs, meters, generators, switchgear, and SCADA systems, to provide unified dashboards, automated alerts, an asset relationship graph, and an AI assistant for sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, and data centers. Built by a six-person software and electrical engineering team, the platform processes roughly 1,000 to 10,000 data points per second through edge servers, MQTT, Kafka, Redis, and local and cloud-hosted TimescaleDB instances, retaining operational resilience during connectivity losses while maintaining a central portfolio-wide record. The company selected TimescaleDB after evaluating InfluxDB and AWS options because its PostgreSQL foundation allowed it to use SQL, existing tooling, hypertables, compression, and fast time-series queries without introducing a separate database system. ControlCom reports that the system can instantly re-bucket and visualize more than 300 million monthly data points, support real-time AI queries, identify over $160,000 in utility billing errors at a healthcare site, and alert a hospital that backup generators had been left in manual mode. Looking ahead, the company plans to expand real-time stream processing and anomaly detection as its connected asset base and telemetry volumes grow.