Author: David Sterling

David Sterling is a PostgreSQL database expert specializing in performance optimization, query tuning, and database administration. With years of experience helping developers and businesses optimize their PostgreSQL deployments, David shares practical insights and best practices on this blog. For inquiries or consulting, contact: [email protected]
Architecture and operations

How OpenAI Scales PostgreSQL: 5 Ops Lessons

OpenAI’s engineering team recently published “Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users” — a detailed account of how ChatGPT’s primary data store survives traffic that would flatten most databases. The headline: it’s one PostgreSQL primary handling every write, roughly 50 read replicas, and a stack of operational habits that keep the write path alive. […]

David Sterling 
Performance and tuning postgresql

Postgres Connection Pooling: Lessons from OpenAI

OpenAI’s engineers recently shared how PostgreSQL sits at the core of ChatGPT’s infrastructure, serving 800 million users. You do not need ChatGPT-scale traffic for the lesson to apply. In Houston, the same failure pattern shows up in energy trading dashboards, medical claims pipelines, and logistics telematics fleets: the database slows down under load long before […]

David Sterling