Every PostgreSQL developer knows the four isolation levels from the SQL standard: Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Serializable. Fewer
Continue readingPostgreSQL Isolation Levels: What Repeatable Read Actually Guarantees
PostgreSQL takes an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock for most ALTER TABLE operations. That lock conflicts with everything — reads, writes, even
Every PostgreSQL backend process is a full Unix process with its own megabytes of memory. That design choice buys you
Every UPDATE in PostgreSQL is secretly an INSERT-plus-a-tombstone. The old row version stays on disk, fully readable to any transaction
Continue readingMVCC and VACUUM in PostgreSQL: Dead Tuples, Autovacuum Tuning, and What PG18 Changed
Solve the dual-write problem with one extra table and SKIP LOCKED: a working Go implementation of the transactional outbox, plus the delivery-semantics gotchas that bite in production. … Continue readingThe Transactional Outbox Pattern: Reliable Events Without Distributed Transactions
Every API that returns a list eventually has to answer the same question: how do you hand out a million
Every slow query investigation eventually reaches the same moment: you run EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and the plan makes no sense. Postgres
Continue readingReading EXPLAIN ANALYZE: Why Postgres Ignores Your Index
Every schema migration tool will happily tell you how to change a table. Almost none of them will tell you
Continue readingZero-Downtime Database Migrations: Expand-Contract, Backfills, and Locks
Every PostgreSQL connection is a process on the server. Not a thread, not an entry in a table — a
Continue readingDatabase Connection Pooling: PgBouncer, Pool Sizing, and the Math Behind Both
PostgreSQL versus MySQL is one of the oldest rivalries in software, and like most old rivalries it is mostly narrated
Continue readingPostgreSQL vs MySQL in 2026: A Practitioner’s Comparison