sql

Did Postgres Lose My Data?

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ March 26, 2023 ⋅ Leave a comment

Hello, let me introduce myself. Today, we’ll pretend that I’m a linguistics researcher. I don’t know much about databases, but I do know a lot about the Balti language of northern Pakistan. That’s why I’m excited about my current translation project. The most interesting part of this translation project is that I’m doing some computer-driven … Continue reading →

Researching the Performance Puzzle

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ July 31, 2022 ⋅ 1 Comment

The PostgreSQL Performance Puzzle was, perhaps, too easy – it didn’t take long for someone to guess the correct answer! But I didn’t see much discussion about why the difference or what was happening. My emphasis on the magnitude of the difference was a tip-off that there’s much more than meets the eye with 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 →

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 →

Largest Tables Including Indexes and LOBs

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ December 4, 2013 ⋅ 3 Comments

Just a quick code snippit. I do a lot of data pumps to move schemas between different databases; for example taking a copy of a schema to an internal database to try to reproduce a problem. Some of these schemas have some very large tables. The large tables aren’t always needed to research a particular … Continue reading →