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PostgreSQL Performance Puzzle

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ July 16, 2022 ⋅ 15 Comments

Update 7/18: y’all guessed the answer to my puzzle very fast! At the bottom of this blog post, I’ve added the expressions that I used (with credit to those who guessed it), and also other expressions guessed by readers which exhibited similar behavior. I’ll do another follow-up blog post touching on several layers of this … Continue reading →

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

Update 2024-Jan-24: this post has been linked from a few places after I wrote it in 2021. Just wanted to mention that there’s been ongoing discussion about logical replication and PostgreSQL. Instacart also has a newer blog post out about zero-downtime cutovers and it sounds like they’ve built some cool tooling. I think that two … 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 →