Michael Christofides
Founder of pgMustard
Appears in 182 Episodes
transaction_timeout
Nikolay and Michael discuss transaction_timeout (a recently committed addition for Postgres 17) — what it's for, how to get around not having it already, and whether i...
Rails + Postgres
Michael and Nikolay are joined by Andrew Atkinson, author of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails, to discuss how Rails and Postgres work together — where the limits ...
Why isn't Postgres using my index?
Nikolay and Michael discuss a common question — why Postgres isn't using an index, and what you can do about it! Here are some links to things they mentioned: Why is...
Overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache
Nikolay and Michael discuss the overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache — mostly focusing on some interesting things Nikolay found while stress-testing some ...
Modern SQL
Michael is joined by Markus Winand, creator of use-the-index-luke.com and modern-sql.com, and author of SQL Performance Explained, to discuss Modern SQL — what Markus ...
Bloat
Michael is joined by Chelsea Dole, Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead of the Data Storage Team at Brex, to discuss bloat. They cover what it is, why it's a problem,...
pgvector
Michael is joined by Jonathan Katz, PostgreSQL Core Team member, Principle Product Manager at AWS, and also pgvector contributor, to discuss pgvector. They cover what ...
pgBadger
Michael is joined by Alicja Kucharczyk, Program Manager for Azure Database for PostgreSQL at Microsoft and organiser of the Warsaw PostgreSQL User Group, to discuss Al...
EXPLAIN
With Nikolay taking a well-earned break, Michael covers the basics of EXPLAIN — what it is, the parameters available, and a process he recommends for using it. Here ...
Partitioning by ULID
Nikolay and Michael discuss partitioning by ULID — revisiting some of the old UUID vs bigint key debate in light of some new UUID specs, and how these can be used for ...
Hash indexes
Nikolay and Michael discuss hash indexes in Postgres — what they are, some brief history, their pros and cons vs btrees, and whether or when they recommend using them....
Constraints
Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL constraints — the six different types we have, how to add and modify them, including on large tables with high TPS. Here are ...
Events
Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL events — whether in-person or online, large conferences or small meet-ups, as well as some strong opinions based on their experi...
Subtransactions
Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL subtransactions — what they are, and four issues they can cause at scale. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Subtr...
Companion databases
Nikolay and Michael discuss companion databases — when and why you might want to add another database management system to your stack (or not), and some specifics for ...
Blue-green deployments
Nikolay and Michael discuss blue-green deployments — specifically an RDS blog post, how similar this is (or not) to what they understand to be blue-green deployments, ...
Data model trade-offs
Nikolay and Michael discuss data model trade-offs — some cases where you might want to (gasp) de-normalize, and which PostgreSQL internals are at play. Here are som...
Under-indexing
Nikolay and Michael discuss under-indexing — how to tell if this applies to you, some general and specific cases, as well as some tricky ones. Here are some links t...
Over-indexing
Nikolay and Michael discuss over-indexing — what we mean by it, the regular issues people discuss about it, as well as a novel one Nikolay has come across and benchmar...
Query hints
Nikolay and Michael discuss query hints — what they are, what we do and don't have in PostgreSQL, and some other things in and around the ecosystem to be aware of. ...