FEBRUARY 2026

Index Advisor Goes Cluster-Aware, Better Planner Hints, Plus New MCP Webinar

Hi there,

We made it to February! We started this month with shipping a big upgrade to Index Advisor: it's now cluster-aware, combining workloads across primaries and replicas so you get one unified set of index recommendations instead of conflicting advice per server.

Are you wondering if you could fix slow queries faster with AI tools? Whilst "AI" is certainly not the one-size-fits-all solution that we are often promised, there are use cases where AI code assistants like Claude Code work pretty well. And thanks to MCP servers, we can implement specific workflows, like optimizing a Postgres database query. In our upcoming February 26th webinar, I'll share how we can safely provide Postgres production statistics to AI tools, when (not) to use them, and what the upcoming pganalyze MCP server offers.

These days, one thing that often comes too short is code reviews. To do my own part, over the holiday break, I sat down and reviewed a series of Postgres patches by Robert Haas, that intend to give Postgres better planner hints. And the first patch ("allow plugin control over path generation strategies"), is now committed to Postgres 19. Watch the new 5mins of Postgres episode to learn more, including how it will help future maintenance of pg_hint_plan.

One more thing: our own Ryan Booz is co-leading a full-day, in-person PostgreSQL training at SCaLE 23x on March 5th in Pasadena, alongside Elizabeth Christensen and Devrim Gunduz. It's great for anyone new to Postgres or looking to sharpen their performance tuning and administration skills. Use the code PGSQL for 40% off registration.

As always, you can find the complete list of pganalyze product updates at the end. And we look forward to seeing you at pgDay Paris and PG Day Nordic next month if you're attending.

 Live Session

Can AI + MCP Fix Your Slow Postgres Queries Faster?

5min of Postgres

Waiting for Postgres 19: Plan Generation Strategies

Product News

pganalyze Index Advisor is Now Cluster-Aware

Ever dropped an index that looked unused only to find out it was serving queries on a read replica? That's the problem with analyzing Postgres servers in isolation. To address this challenge, we're announcing the updated pganalyze Index Advisor, which is now cluster-aware. It combines workloads across primaries and replicas to produce one unified set of recommendations. No more conflicting insights. No more guesswork about what's actually in use.

Available now for Scale and Enterprise cloud plans. Enterprise Server coming in the next release.

Product Updates

What's New in pganalyze

Query Performance

• Query Advisor: Avoid internal error when referenced EXPLAIN plans have aged out
  • On resolved Query Advisor issues you may not be able to access the associated EXPLAIN plan anymore (which is only retained for 7 days currently).
  • Instead of showing an error, show a notice explaining this.
• Workbooks: Fix bug preventing use of manually created parameter sets
  • This bug in a recent change incorrectly prevented the creation of Workbooks that were using manually added parameters instead of query samples with an error like "Either parameterSet, queryText, or querySampleIds is required".
• Persist search input in query string
  • This allows navigating back to a page of filtered results (e.g., in the Query Performance list) and maintain the filtered list

Schema & Plan Statistics

• Fix tree map links to tables and indexes to preserve date range selection
• Improve display for queries that run infrequently
  • Previously the plan statistics graphs would show data points where the query didn't run with the dashed area marker, typically used for missing data for the whole database/server.
  • Instead, the graphs now show zero at such points when there were other queries with activity on that database.

Collector WebSocket Connection

• Show warning when the collector WebSocket connection is unhealthy

  • In 2024 the collector moved to a persistent WebSocket connection to reduce overhead and enable two-way communication.

  • If your servers haven't been updated to a recent collector version or have networking issues that don't allow the connection to stay alive for at least an hour, you will now see an in-app warning.

  • Later in 2026 we plan to drop the legacy API and require a WebSocket connection, so please reach out to support if you see this warning.

Postgres 17 & 18 Updates

• Show autovacuum_vacuum_max_threshold value for Postgres 18+

  • The dead rows graph now takes autovacuum_vacuum_max_threshold into account when available, improving visibility into when autovacuum is expected to run.

• Config Settings: Update bundled Postgres documentation to include Postgres 18

• Connections: Update wait event name list to support Postgres 18
  • Previously, some wait event names were not appearing correctly on the Connections page and were shown as Unknown (e.g. Activity / Unknown instead of Activity / BgwriterMain).
• Support showing EXPLAIN plans containing JIT info using new (Postgres 17) format

pganalyze Collector v0.68.0, v0.68.1 and v0.68.2

• Add support for PlanetScale databases
  • This adds PlanetScale as a new supported server type, including log fetching from PlanetScale's log services
  • New configuration settings: planetscale_org / PLANETSCALE_ORG,
    planetscale_database / PLANETSCALE_DATABASE, and
    planetscale_branch / PLANETSCALE_BRANCH for identifying instances
• Improve collector log analysis
  • Add matching for autovacuum messages produced by newer AlloyDB versions and Postgres 18
  • Handle terminology changes in Postgres 14+ where "misses" became "reads" in buffer usage reporting
  • Capture SLRU and LSN information from checkpoint completion messages
  • Add new log event type for connection authenticated messages
  • Expand patterns for connection failure scenarios
• Add Vector OTLP export configuration example to contrib/vector
  • This supports using Vector instead of Fluentbit for forwarding log events
    via OpenTelemetry Protocol
• Fix infrequent crash in query normalization when encountering certain utility statements
• Do not fail snapshot collection when pg_stat_statements is missing with Postgres 14+ 
  • In such situations we now report a snapshot with an error state, as was the case
• Allow explicitly setting Cluster ID
  • The new api_cluster_id / API_CLUSTER_ID setting enables overriding the automatically detected cluster ID, or set it on platforms that don't have built-in detection.
  • This value is stored by pganalyze for each server, and used for grouping servers together. Alternate mechanisms to create server groups in pganalyze will be offered in a future release.

Other Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Fix links on some Index Advisor pages that had incorrectly-generated links to the queries involved
• Fix "Replication - High Lag" check-up graph rendering issue
• Fix occasional issues that caused parts of the app to be shown with

  limited seven day retention instead of normal retention

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