26 articles tagged Postgresql
Database restore drills that mean something
A repeatable PostgreSQL restore drill that measures recovery time, data loss window and integrity, plus the failure modes that make drills lie.
15 min read · 28 October 2026
Idempotency keys: what they fix, what they don't
How idempotency keys work, where they fail, and the failure modes they don't cover: concurrent retries, key reuse, expiry, and partial failures.
14 min read · 21 September 2026
Designing a Schema That Survives Embedding Model Upgrades
Why embedding columns break on model upgrades, how to version vectors, migrate legacy JSON payloads, and when to offload to a vector store.
11 min read · 13 September 2026
Replace managed services with Postgres 17
How to decide whether to replace managed cache, search, and scheduler services with Postgres extensions, and how to measure the trade-off honestly.
14 min read · 16 August 2026
Agent SLOs: measure what agents actually do
Latency and 5xx SLOs miss stuck loops. Define outcome SLOs on completion rate, with schema, PromQL, and failure handling.
13 min read · 11 August 2026
Senior role projects: 3 real paths
Build three portfolio projects that demonstrate tenant isolation, retry-storm handling, and event sourcing, with concrete ways to measure each claim.
16 min read · 5 August 2026
CDC pipeline death spiral: one bad LLM call can crash…
How unconstrained LLM bursts stall CDC pipelines, and how to add backpressure at each layer with metrics, configs, and a worked failure example.
12 min read · 2 August 2026
Postgres vector search: what breaks first
pgvector works until load grows. Here is what fails first, how to measure it, and when a dedicated ANN service earns its operational cost.
13 min read · 24 July 2026
Poolers won’t save your serverless DB
Why poolers add latency and cost to bursty serverless workloads, and how multiplexing, the Aurora Data API, and direct connections compare.
14 min read · 19 July 2026
Agent context: short-term vs long-term memory
Compare Redis-style short-term agent context with Postgres event logs: latency, durability, auditability, cost, and how to measure each.
15 min read · 9 July 2026
Designing Fintech Backends Around Audit Deadlines
Regulatory audit deadlines change how you should split services. A worked example of transaction boundaries, outbox patterns and WAL-based audit reads.
13 min read · 3 July 2026
Stop the writes — zero-downtime DB migrations
Zero-downtime migrations fail when writes keep flowing during the copy. A drain-copy-flip state machine, with instrumentation and a decision checklist.
13 min read · 2 July 2026
Postgres 17 swallowed Redis, Kafka, Timescale
How to evaluate consolidating Redis, Kafka and a time-series database into Postgres extensions, with honest limits, failure modes and a checklist.
14 min read · 2 July 2026
RAG on legacy systems: vector DB vs. full-text SQL
Compare vector databases and in-database vector search for adding RAG to legacy systems, with latency, cost, and operational trade-offs.
14 min read · 30 June 2026
Spot AI’s hidden cost spike in your stack
AI refactors often trade cache hits for database reads, exhausting pools and inflating bills. Here is how to detect, verify and gate the change.
14 min read · 28 June 2026
Migrations? Stop running them live
Why live schema migrations cause outages, and how versioning the schema as a deployable artifact with expand/contract steps reduces that risk.
11 min read · 28 June 2026
Monolith to services without a rewrite
Most monolith-to-services migrations fail on data coupling, not code structure. Here is how to audit coupling and measure the latency tax before extracting.
14 min read · 27 June 2026
Postgres 17 buried Redis, S3, cron
How to evaluate Postgres 17 as a cache, scheduler and blob store, with measurement steps, failure modes and a decision checklist.
11 min read · 26 June 2026
Store data once, serve everywhere: cheaper
How to serve reads from regional caches instead of replicating your database everywhere, with worked cost math, invalidation code, and failure modes.
12 min read · 25 June 2026
Log audit costs without breaking compliance
Compare PostgreSQL and ClickHouse for audit logging: write amplification, query latency, retention, cost modelling, and a decision checklist.
13 min read · 22 June 2026
Vibe code: works great, fails forever
Ten failure modes that make vibe-coded MVPs unmaintainable, with code fixes, measurement recipes, and a hardening checklist for each.
13 min read · 20 June 2026
Regulations forced better APIs: the 2026 fintech
Why payment APIs need durable state machines, explicit retry policies, and status endpoints that survive restarts — and when the old synchronous playbook still works.
13 min read · 20 June 2026
Webhook Delivery: Retries, Idempotency, and Durability
Design reliable webhook ingestion with durable buffering, idempotency keys, bounded retries, and circuit breakers, plus how to measure each guarantee.
11 min read · 19 June 2026
Why AI Interview Graders Reward Keywords Over Correct Design
AI interview graders score answers against training-data patterns, not correctness. Here is how the bias shows up and how to write answers that survive it.
12 min read · 14 June 2026
Build a search system in 2026: semantic, keyword
How to build a hybrid search service with PostgreSQL, pgvector, and Redis: schema, keyword and semantic queries, reranking, caching, and how to measure recall.
13 min read · 10 June 2026
Soft deletes fail: what breaks first
Soft deletes leak into every query and bloat indexes. Here is how to measure the damage and move to a tiered live/archive/cold lifecycle.
13 min read · 9 June 2026