15 articles tagged with Postgres.
A practitioner's guide to choosing between serverless and provisioned databases based on cost, latency, connections, and load shape.
A practitioner comparison of Neon's serverless Postgres against PlanetScale's Vitess-backed MySQL to help you pick the right database.
A single ALTER TABLE took a lock and stalled every write for 40 seconds during peak traffic. Expand-contract is how we stopped shipping outages.
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.
The dashboard said the database was fine. It wasn't. Here's how pg_stat_statements found the query eating 40% of our Postgres CPU.
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.
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.
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.
