Pagination looks like the least interesting problem in backend engineering — until the page that took 30 ms at depth
Continue readingPagination at Depth: Why OFFSET Falls Over and How to Build Cursors That Don’t
Every slow query investigation eventually arrives at the same place: the EXPLAIN output. It is the single most information-dense tool
Continue readingReading the Plan: What EXPLAIN ANALYZE Is Actually Telling You
Every relational database ships an isolation level selector, and most applications pick whatever the default is and move on. That
Continue readingSnapshot Isolation and Write Skew: What Your Database Actually Promises
The migration that works on staging and melts down production usually dies in the lock queue. Someone runs an ALTER
Continue readingZero-Downtime Schema Migrations: Expand-Contract on PostgreSQL, Step by Step
Almost every API starts its pagination life with LIMIT 20 OFFSET 40. It’s the pattern every ORM hands you, it
Continue readingPagination That Doesn’t Fall Apart at Page 50,000: Keyset Cursors Done Right
A slow query arrives. Someone runs EXPLAIN ANALYZE, pastes the output into a search engine, and a verdict comes back:
Continue readingReading EXPLAIN ANALYZE Like a Planner: A PostgreSQL Field Guide
Ask a PostgreSQL database administrator what kills databases in production and you’ll hear about wraparound — the event where a
Every schema migration is easy the first time, when the table is empty and the only user is your test
Continue readingZero-Downtime PostgreSQL Migrations: Locks, Rewrites, and Expand-and-Contract
# POST 2: Reading EXPLAIN A query that ran in 20 milliseconds yesterday takes 40 seconds today. Nothing in the
Continue readingReading EXPLAIN Like a Planner: Debugging Slow Queries in PostgreSQL
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