24 articles tagged with Database.
A 900GB events table where every query scanned four years to read one day. Range partitioning by month cut our dashboard queries from 8s to under 200ms.
A 40GB index on a 6GB table was the first sign. Queries were fine until they weren't. Here's how we found the bloat and cleared it with zero downtime.
Both put SQLite near your users, but they solve replication and write latency very differently. We ran the same schema on both for a month and picked one.
Sharding isn't just "split the table" — the shard key choice cascades through queries, joins, rebalancing, and operations. The decisions that pay off and the ones we redid.
pg_upgrade is fast but takes downtime; logical replication lets you cut over while the old DB still serves traffic. The runbook, the gotchas, and the post-cutover checklist.
The single most useful Postgres extension you might not be using. The queries it surfaces, the indexes it implies, and the operational discipline of reading it weekly.
Edge compute is useless without an edge data layer. Three serverless databases that put data within ms of your edge functions, with the tradeoffs that aren't on the marketing pages.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE output is dense and intimidating. Once you can read it, most slow-query investigations finish in minutes. The patterns we keep seeing.
Backups are easy. Restores are hard. The quarterly drill we run, what's failed during it, and the discipline that makes "we have backups" actually mean something.
Replication is the foundation of database HA. What we monitor, how we practice failover, and the gotchas that show up only when you actually fail over.
Why Postgres connection limits bite at unexpected times, the pooling layer we put in front, and the pool-mode tradeoffs we learned the hard way.
A 2 AM incident, the autovacuum settings that caused it, and the parameter changes that prevented the next one. The discipline that took our biggest Postgres host from periodic stalls to steady.
