Expert PostgreSQL tutorials, tips, and performance optimization guides. Learn database administration, query optimization, and best practices for PostgreSQL 18 and beyond.
High‑availability setups, backups and recovery, major/minor upgrade strategies, and Kubernetes/containers content.
Patterns for multi‑tenant SaaS, read scaling, partitioning, and observability/monitoring.
Most failover drills end the same way: the standby takes over, applications reconnect, and everyone goes home. The part that quietly broke is backup continuity. A community question summarized this week by Stefan Fercot on his pgBackRest blog describes exactly this: a standby was promoted with archive_mode=off, and the team wanted to avoid restarting the […]
PostgreSQL 19 slipped, so plan the upgrade you can actually control: a logical replication cutover with sizing, rehearsal, runbook and rollback.
A three-node Patroni cluster on commodity VMs costs less than one hour of downtime. Here is the architecture, the config, and how to prove it works before you need it. Tom Lane recently walked through the architectural decisions that shaped 30 years of Postgres, and one theme runs through it: Postgres was built to be […]
On August 13, 2026 the PostgreSQL Global Development Group released 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, 14.24 and 19 Beta 3. If you run logical replication, manage pg_upgrade plans, or operate in FIPS-enforced environments, this is not a routine minor release — two of the security fixes change runtime behavior in ways that can break production after […]
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. […]
Monitoring is the backbone of every production PostgreSQL deployment. Whether you run Patroni-managed high availability on your own hardware or Amazon Aurora in the cloud, you cannot fix what you cannot see. Yet most monitoring setups I audit collect hundreds of metrics and alert on almost none of them — or worse, they page a […]
Backups are the operation every team postpones until the day it needs one. On Amazon RDS and Aurora, the cloud takes snapshots for you — but “the cloud does it” is not a recovery plan. Snapshots fail. Restores time out. Permissions get forgotten. If you have not actually restored a backup this quarter, you do […]
Major version upgrades on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL are the rare database operation that AWS deliberately keeps manual. There is a good reason: each major release can carry breaking changes, and AWS wants a human to sign off before the database switches formats. For Houston teams running energy trading, logistics, and healthcare […]
If you operate upstream assets in the Greater Houston area, you understand the data volume problem: thousands of sensors generating 5,000–10,000 data points per second across wells, compressors, SCADA systems, separators, and field infrastructure. Traditional relational databases buckle under that load. Time-series databases designed for financial markets don’t speak the language of oil and gas […]
Connection pooling is one of the fastest ways to fix a “slow” PostgreSQL-backed app without touching a single query. In 2026, most production stacks sit behind some mix of driver-level pooling, PgBouncer, and sometimes pgpool-II—but they’re not interchangeable. This post walks through how PostgreSQL handles connections, where pooling actually helps, and when you should reach […]
