17 articles tagged with Postgres.
GitLab lost six hours of data to one command on the wrong host. Linear lost five hours to one TRUNCATE CASCADE in a reviewed migration. The six guardrails that make that kind of mistake hard to make and cheap to recover from.
Most teams shipping retrieval do not need a dedicated vector database. Here is where Postgres runs out, and which specialist actually helps when it does.
A practitioner comparison of Neon's serverless Postgres against PlanetScale's Vitess-backed MySQL to help you pick the right database.
A practitioner's guide to choosing between serverless and provisioned databases based on cost, latency, connections, and load shape.
Adding a read replica cut primary load 60%, then support tickets rolled in about users not seeing their own edits. Replication lag turned into a correctness bug we had to route around.
A single ALTER TABLE can queue behind one long query and stall every write behind it. Expand-contract is how you stop shipping outages with schema changes.
An events table where every query scanned years of history to read one day. Range partitioning by month makes recent-data queries prune to one partition and turns retention into a DROP TABLE.
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.
Sharding is more than "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.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE output is dense and intimidating. Once you can read it, most slow-query investigations finish in minutes. The patterns we keep seeing.
