PostgreSQL Field Notes

Notes for the problems that show up after launch: bad plans, awkward migrations, index debt, vacuum pressure, replica lag, and the small decisions that make PostgreSQL easier to operate.

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February 3, 20265 min read

Advisory Locks in Postgres: A Simple Tool That Deserves Respect

Advisory locks are useful precisely because Postgres does not know what they mean. They give you cross-process coordination that does not depend on rows.

February 2, 20265 min read

Postgres Arrays: When They Help and When They Hide a Modeling Problem

Arrays are a Postgres feature that can simplify code and a feature that can lock you into bad design. Here is the rule I use to decide when to reach for them.

February 1, 20266 min read

JSONB vs Relational Columns: The Tradeoff Most Schemas Get Wrong

JSONB is great for things that genuinely vary per row. It is wrong for things that are stable. Most teams use it for both, and pay for it in queries that should have been simple.

January 31, 20266 min read

WAL Monitoring in Postgres: What to Watch Before Disk Becomes the Story

WAL is fine when it is fine and a crisis when it is not. Three signals tell you the difference, and they are not the ones the dashboards usually surface.

January 30, 20265 min read

NUMERIC vs DOUBLE PRECISION in Postgres: The Difference That Hides in Money

Storing money as `DOUBLE PRECISION` is one of the bugs that takes years to surface. The numbers look right until they don't.

January 29, 20267 min read

Full-Text Search in Postgres: Good Enough, Until It Isn't

Postgres full-text search is great for the cases it covers and frustrating for the cases it doesn't. Knowing where the line is saves a year of trying to make it do what Elasticsearch does.

January 28, 20265 min read

CITEXT in Postgres: Case-Insensitive Text Without the LOWER Trap

CITEXT is the type for text columns where case should not matter. It is simpler than expression indexes, more reliable than application-level normalization.

January 27, 20266 min read

Range Types in Postgres: The Built-in Solution to Overlap Problems

Range types model time windows, numeric ranges, and any "from-to" data. They support overlap queries natively and combine with EXCLUDE constraints to prevent invalid data.

January 26, 20266 min read

Materialized Views in Postgres: Cheap Reads, Expensive Refreshes

Materialized views trade staleness for query speed. The tradeoff is right when the underlying data changes slowly and the query is expensive.

January 25, 20266 min read

Rollup Tables in Postgres: The Pattern That Replaces Most BI Queries

Rollup tables are pre-aggregated summaries of source data, kept up to date via triggers or scheduled jobs. They turn dashboard queries from seconds into milliseconds.

January 24, 20268 min read

Postgres Checkpoint Tuning: The Latency Spike Nobody Sees Coming

Latency climbs for 30 seconds, then recovers. CPU is fine. Queries are fine. Nobody deployed anything. Welcome to the checkpoint problem, and the four settings that make it go away.

January 23, 20267 min read

Time-Series Data in Postgres: Honest Tradeoffs Before You Reach for TimescaleDB

Postgres handles time-series data better than people assume. The decision to add a specialized extension should come from observed limits, not preemptive optimization.