Postgres for Backend Engineers

Indexing Past B-tree

GIN, GiST, BRIN, partial, and expression indexes explained through the workloads that actually need them.

Locking and Contention

Row locks, table locks, SELECT FOR UPDATE, and the tools Postgres gives you to diagnose and break contention before it takes down production.

JSONB Without Regret

When JSONB is the right tool, when it isn't, how to index it properly, and the schema discipline that prevents a flexible column from becoming an unmaintainable blob.

Partitioning for Real Workloads

Declarative table partitioning in Postgres—range, list, and hash strategies—with pruning mechanics, foreign key constraints, and the operational realities that textbook examples omit.

Replication Topologies

Physical replication, logical replication, cascading standbys, and the decision matrix for which topology fits each deployment scenario.

Logical Decoding and CDC

How Postgres logical decoding works under the hood, the pgoutput plugin, replication slots, and building production-grade change data capture pipelines with Debezium.

Connection Pooling Realities

Why Postgres connections are expensive, how PgBouncer's pooling modes differ, and the specific application patterns that break under transaction pooling.

Query Planning Intuition

How the Postgres query planner works, what EXPLAIN ANALYZE output actually tells you, and how to guide the planner through statistics and configuration rather than hints.

Upgrades, Majors and Minors

The mechanics of Postgres minor and major version upgrades, pg_upgrade vs logical replication migration, the rolling-restart story for standbys, and the operational checklist that prevents surprises.

Postgres on Kubernetes

Kubernetes operators for Postgres, the storage and networking constraints that make stateful databases different from stateless workloads, and when managed RDS/Cloud SQL is the honest answer.