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Explore every episode of the podcast Postgres FM

Dive into the complete episode list for Postgres FM. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.

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TitlePub. DateDuration
Append-only tables15 nov. 202400:44:07

Nikolay and Michael discuss append-only tables in Postgres — what they are, some unique challenges they bring, and some options for compressing / removing / offloading the data eventually.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Denormalization08 nov. 202400:35:08

Nikolay and Michael discuss denormalization in Postgres — when and why to denormalize things, and a couple of specific cases Nikolay came across recently. 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Postgres online communities01 nov. 202400:38:09

Nikolay and Michael discuss online Postgres communities — the ones they prefer, the types of conversations in each, and some other places to ask questions or follow news. 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Advanced psql25 oct. 202400:52:37

Nikolay and Michael discuss some cool things you can do with psql, the official CLI that ships with Postgres.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Postgres Gotchas18 oct. 202400:40:19

Nikolay and Michael discuss some Postgres Gotchas, things you might expect to work one way in fact working another way.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Advanced EXPLAIN11 oct. 202400:48:47

Nikolay and Michael discuss some more advanced topics around EXPLAIN, including some tips for complex query plans, some recent improvements, and an idea or two that might make it even better.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Patroni04 oct. 202400:45:33

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Alexander Kukushkin, PostgreSQL contributor and maintainer of Patroni, to discuss all things Patroni — what it is, how it works, recent improvements, and more.

Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Postgres 1727 sept. 202400:42:03

Nikolay and Michael discuss the fresh new Postgres 17 release! They cover several performance improvements, favourite new features, and some considerations for upgrading.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Planning time20 sept. 202400:42:17

Nikolay and Michael discuss planning time in Postgres — what it is, how to spot issues, its relationship to things like partitioning, and some tips for avoiding issues.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Slow count13 sept. 202400:43:25

Nikolay and Michael discuss why counting can be slow in Postgres, and what the options are for counting things quickly at scale.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Skip scan06 sept. 202400:57:49

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Peter Geoghegan, major contributor and committer to Postgres, to discuss adding skip scan support to PostgreSQL over versions 17 and 18.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Postgres Emergency Room30 août 202400:45:27

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL emergencies — both the psychological side of incident management, and some technical aspects too.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Get or Create23 août 202400:50:19

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Haki Benita, a technical lead and database enthusiast who writes an excellent blog and gives popular talks and training sessions too, to discuss the surprisingly complex topic of trying to implement “get or create” in PostgreSQL — handling issues around idempotency, concurrency, and bloat.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Getting started with benchmarking16 août 202400:56:32

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Melanie Plageman, database internals engineer at Microsoft and major contributor and committer to PostgreSQL, to discuss getting started with benchmarking — how it differs for users and developers of Postgres, how and when it comes up during development, some tools and lessons, as well as what she's working on at the moment.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Index-Only Scans09 août 202400:39:15

Nikolay and Michael discuss Index-Only Scans in Postgres — what they are, how they help, some things to look out for, and some advice.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Why Postgres?02 août 202400:41:00

Nikolay and Michael discuss why they chose Postgres — as users, for their businesses, for their careers, as well as some doubts.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Compression26 juil. 202400:45:16

Nikolay and Michael discuss compression in Postgres — what's available natively, newer algorithms in recent versions, and several extensions with compression features.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

  • Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork 
Out of disk19 juil. 202400:43:26

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres running out of disk space — including what happens, what can cause it, how to recover, and most importantly, how to prevent it from happening in the first place.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Postgres startup ecosystem12 juil. 202400:35:42

Nikolay and Michael discuss the Postgres startup ecosystem — some recent closures, some recent fundraising announcements, and their thoughts on where things are going and what they'd like to see.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Four million TPS05 juil. 202400:45:50

Nikolay talks Michael through a recent experiment to find the current maximum transactions per second single-node Postgres can achieve — why he was looking into it, what bottlenecks occurred along the way, and ideas for follow up experiments.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Soft delete28 juin 202400:37:40

Nikolay and Michael discuss soft deletion in Postgres — what it means, several use cases, some implementation options, and which implementations suit which use cases.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Should we use foreign keys?21 juin 202400:51:21

Nikolay and Michael discuss foreign keys in Postgres — what they are, their benefits, their overhead, some edge cases to be aware of, some improvements coming, and whether or not they generally recommend using them.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

pgvectorscale14 juin 202400:55:27

Nikolay is joined by Mat Arye and John Pruitt, from Timescale, to discuss their new extension pgvectorscale and high-performance vector search in Postgres more generally.
 
Main links:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

To 100TB, and beyond! 07 juin 202400:47:42

Michael and Nikolay are joined by three special guests for episode 100 who have all scaled Postgres to significant scale — Arka Ganguli from Notion, Sammy Steele from Figma, and Derk van Veen from Adyen. They cover how their setup has evolved, what their plans are for the future, and get into the weeds of some fun and interesting challenges along the way!

Links to some of the things discussed: 


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Sponsoring the community31 mai 202400:32:17

Michael is joined by Claire Giordano, Head of Postgres Open Source Community Initiatives at Microsoft, to discuss several ways to contribute to the Postgres community — from core contributions, to extensions, to events, and (of course) podcasts.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Full text search24 mai 202400:50:20

Nikolay and Michael discuss full text search in Postgres — some of the history, some of the features, and whether it now makes sense to try to replace or combine it with semantic search.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Minor releases17 mai 202400:39:46

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres minor releases — how the schedule works, options for upgrading to them, and the importance of reading the release notes.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Custom vs generic plan10 mai 202400:29:00

Nikolay and Michael discuss custom and generic planning in prepared statements — how it works, how issues can present themselves, some ways to view the generic plan, and some benefits of avoiding planning (not just time). 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

LIMIT vs Performance03 mai 202400:45:23

Nikolay and Michael discuss LIMIT in Postgres — what it does, how it can help with performance, and an interesting example where adding it can actually hurt performance(!)
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Buffers II (the sequel)26 avr. 202400:36:13

Nikolay and Michael return to the topic of using the buffers explain parameter — with a new analogy, some (conspiracy) theories of why it's still not on by default, and some related chat about the serialize parameter coming in 17.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Massive DELETEs19 avr. 202400:44:28

Nikolay and Michael discuss doing massive DELETE operations in Postgres — what can go wrong, how to prevent major issues, and some ideas to minimise their impact.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Logical replication common issues12 avr. 202400:38:12

Nikolay and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur, CEO and Co-founder of PeerDB, to discuss how to overcome several logical replication issues. They discuss the protocol versions, minimising slot growth, minimising lag, and some tips and tricks for scaling things well.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Don't do this05 avr. 202400:44:31

Nikolay and Michael discuss several "Don't do this" lists about Postgres — picking out their favourite items, as well as some contentious ones that could be clearer, or not included.

 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Search29 mars 202400:41:32

Nikolay and Michael have a high-level discussion on all things search — touching on full-text search, semantic search, and faceted search. They discuss what comes in Postgres core, what is possible via extensions, and some thoughts on performance vs implementation complexity vs user experience.

 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Health check22 mars 202400:40:49

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres health checks — what they are, things to include, how often makes sense, and whether improvements to Postgres would increase or decrease the need for them.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

superuser15 mars 202400:30:28

Nikolay and Michael discuss the superuser role in PostgreSQL — what it is, how and when it shouldn’t be used, and whether most cloud providers are right to not give us it (no prizes for guessing).
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

transaction_timeout08 mars 202400:26:48

Nikolay and Michael discuss transaction_timeout (a recently committed addition for Postgres 17) — what it's for, how to get around not having it already, and whether it will replace the need to set statement_timeout globally in future.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Rails + Postgres01 mars 202400:45:23

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Andrew Atkinson, author of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails, to discuss how Rails and Postgres work together — where the limits are, how people use the ORM, things that are improving, and some things we can do as a Postgres community to make it even better.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Why isn't Postgres using my index?23 févr. 202400:35:25

Nikolay and Michael discuss a common question — why Postgres isn't using an index, and what you can do about it!
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache16 févr. 202400:34:07

Nikolay and Michael discuss the overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache — mostly focusing on some interesting things Nikolay found while stress-testing some large spot instances up to and beyond 2m TPS(!) 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Modern SQL02 févr. 202400:32:09

Michael is joined by Markus Winand, creator of use-the-index-luke.com and modern-sql.com, and author of SQL Performance Explained, to discuss Modern SQL — what Markus means by it, why it's important, some benefits, some examples, and at least one phrase that should be on a t-shirt.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

Bloat26 janv. 202400:36:17

Michael is joined by Chelsea Dole, Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead of the Data Storage Team at Brex, to discuss bloat. They cover what it is, why it's a problem, strategies for minimising it, and the options when it's really bad.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

pgvector19 janv. 202400:49:06

Michael is joined by Jonathan Katz, PostgreSQL Core Team member, Principle Product Manager at AWS, and also pgvector contributor, to discuss pgvector. They cover what it is, why it's so popular all of a sudden, some tuning and tradeoff guidance, and a look to the future.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

pgBadger12 janv. 202400:31:31

Michael is joined by Alicja Kucharczyk, Program Manager for Azure Database for PostgreSQL at Microsoft and organiser of the Warsaw PostgreSQL User Group, to discuss Alicja's favorite tool: pgBadger. They cover what it is, how and when it's useful, and some guidance for getting the most out of it (without causing an outage).
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:


With special thanks to:

EXPLAIN05 janv. 202400:19:33

With Nikolay taking a well-earned break, Michael covers the basics of EXPLAIN — what it is, the parameters available, and a process he recommends for using it.
 
Here are some links to the things mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

work_mem31 déc. 202300:19:07

Happy holidays! Today's topic is work_mem — how it's used and how to tune it.
 
Related post: https://x.com/samokhvalov/status/1740813478150189172?s=46&t=HSxrW86NZqzPQP9vXVJEWg.

Partitioning by ULID22 déc. 202300:38:53

Nikolay and Michael discuss partitioning by ULID — revisiting some of the old UUID vs bigint key debate in light of some new UUID specs, and how these can be used for partitioning (by time). 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Hash indexes15 déc. 202300:30:32

Nikolay and Michael discuss hash indexes in Postgres — what they are, some brief history, their pros and cons vs btrees, and whether or when they recommend using them.

Update: the idea Nikolay mentioned at the end of this episode turns out to be a little fraught (and as such, inadvisable). 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Constraints08 déc. 202300:39:04

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL constraints — the six different types we have, how to add and modify them, including on large tables with high TPS. 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

Events01 déc. 202300:52:09

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL events — whether in-person or online, large conferences or small meet-ups, as well as some strong opinions based on their experiences attending, speaking, and organising them. 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:


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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!


~~~

Postgres FM is brought to you by:

With special thanks to:

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