PostgreSQL

A Hairy PostgreSQL Incident

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ February 10, 2022 ⋅ 24 Comments

It was 5:17pm today, just as I was wrapping up work for the day, and my manager pinged me with the following chat: <manager>: Hi Jeremy – we have a <other team> ticket – escalated to <leader>, <leader>, etc. <principal> is on trying to advise as well. Are you available this evening if needed for … Continue reading →

PostgreSQL Logical Replicas and Snapshots: Proceed Carefully

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ July 26, 2021 ⋅ Leave a comment

Earlier this year, Christos Christoudias – an Engineer from Instacart – published an article on Medium about Creating a Logical Replica from a Snapshot in RDS Postgres. Recently I’ve seen discussions about this article a few times, in a few different places. Is it safe? Is it ok to do this? A little under a … Continue reading →

Paranoid SQL Execution on Postgres

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ July 6, 2021 ⋅ 1 Comment

Suppose that you want to be completely over-the-top paranoid about making sure that when you execute some particular SQL statement on your Postgres database, you’re doing it in the safest and least risky way? For example, suppose it’s the production database behind your successful startup’s main commercial website. If anything even causes queries to block/pause … Continue reading →

PostgreSQL Invalid Page and Checksum Verification Failed

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ November 8, 2019 ⋅ 1 Comment

At the Seattle PostgreSQL User Group meetup this past Tuesday, we got onto the topic of invalid pages in PostgreSQL. It was a fun discussion and it made me realize that it’d be worth writing down a bunch of the stuff we talked about – it might be interesting to a few more people too! … Continue reading →

Seattle PostgreSQL Meetup This Thursday: New Location

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ June 18, 2019

I’m looking forward to the Seattle PostgreSQL User Group meetup this Thursday (June 20, 2019) at 5:30pm! We’re going to get an early sneak peek at what’s coming later this year in PostgreSQL’s next major release. The current velocity of development in this open source community is staggering and this is an exciting and valuable … Continue reading →

PostgresConf 2019 Summary

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ March 27, 2019 ⋅ 1 Comment

PostgresConf 2019 in New York City is a wrap! Now that I’ve had a few days to recover a little brain capacity, I think I’m ready to attempt a summary. I love conferences for the learning opportunities… inside of sessions and also outside of them. Being the largest PostgreSQL-centered conference in the United States, PostgresConf … Continue reading →

PostgresConf 2019 Training Days

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ March 19, 2019 ⋅ 1 Comment

It feels like PostgresConf in New York is in full swing, even though the main tracks haven’t even started yet! (Oh, and by the way, as of this morning I heard there are still day-passes available for those who haven’t yet registered for the conference… and then you can come hear a great session about … Continue reading →

Column And Table Redefinition With Minimal Locking

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ November 8, 2018 ⋅ 1 Comment

TLDR: Note to future self… (1) Read this before you modify a table on a live PostgreSQL database. If you do it wrong then your app might totally hang. There is a right way to do it which avoids that. (2) Especially remember the lock_timeout step. Many blog posts around the ‘net are missing this … Continue reading →

This Week in PostgreSQL – May 31

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ June 4, 2018

Since last October I’ve been periodically writing up summaries of interesting content I see on the internet related to PostgreSQL (generally blog posts). My original motivation was just to learn more about PostgreSQL – but I’ve started sharing them with a few colleagues and received positive feedback. Thought I’d try posting one of these digests … Continue reading →