Nikolay Samokhvalov
Founder of Postgres AI
Appears in 116 Episodes
Append-only tables
Nikolay and Michael discuss append-only tables in Postgres — what they are, some unique challenges they bring, and some options for compressing / removing / offloading...
Denormalization
Nikolay and Michael discuss denormalization in Postgres — when and why to denormalize things, and a couple of specific cases Nikolay came across recently. Here are so...
Postgres online communities
Nikolay and Michael discuss online Postgres communities — the ones they prefer, the types of conversations in each, and some other places to ask questions or follow ne...
Advanced psql
Nikolay and Michael discuss some cool things you can do with psql, the official CLI that ships with Postgres. Here are some links to things they mentioned:psql docs ht...
Postgres Gotchas
Nikolay and Michael discuss some Postgres Gotchas, things you might expect to work one way in fact working another way. Here are some links to things they mentioned:Ou...
Advanced EXPLAIN
Nikolay and Michael discuss some more advanced topics around EXPLAIN, including some tips for complex query plans, some recent improvements, and an idea or two that mi...
Patroni
Michael and Nikolay are joined by Alexander Kukushkin, PostgreSQL contributor and maintainer of Patroni, to discuss all things Patroni — what it is, how it works, rece...
Postgres 17
Nikolay and Michael discuss the fresh new Postgres 17 release! They cover several performance improvements, favourite new features, and some considerations for upgradi...
Planning time
Nikolay and Michael discuss planning time in Postgres — what it is, how to spot issues, its relationship to things like partitioning, and some tips for avoiding issues...
Slow count
Nikolay and Michael discuss why counting can be slow in Postgres, and what the options are for counting things quickly at scale. Here are some links to things they men...
Skip scan
Michael and Nikolay are joined by Peter Geoghegan, major contributor and committer to Postgres, to discuss adding skip scan support to PostgreSQL over versions 17 and ...
Postgres Emergency Room
Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL emergencies — both the psychological side of incident management, and some technical aspects too. Here are some links to things ...
Get or Create
Michael and Nikolay are joined by Haki Benita, a technical lead and database enthusiast who writes an excellent blog and gives popular talks and training sessions too,...
Getting started with benchmarking
Michael and Nikolay are joined by Melanie Plageman, database internals engineer at Microsoft and major contributor and committer to PostgreSQL, to discuss getting star...
Index-Only Scans
Nikolay and Michael discuss Index-Only Scans in Postgres — what they are, how they help, some things to look out for, and some advice. Here are some links to things th...
Why Postgres?
Nikolay and Michael discuss why they chose Postgres — as users, for their businesses, for their careers, as well as some doubts. Here are some links to things they men...
Compression
Nikolay and Michael discuss compression in Postgres — what's available natively, newer algorithms in recent versions, and several extensions with compression features....
Out of disk
Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres running out of disk space — including what happens, what can cause it, how to recover, and most importantly, how to prevent it fro...
Postgres startup ecosystem
Nikolay and Michael discuss the Postgres startup ecosystem — some recent closures, some recent fundraising announcements, and their thoughts on where things are going ...
Four million TPS
Nikolay talks Michael through a recent experiment to find the current maximum transactions per second single-node Postgres can achieve — why he was looking into it, wh...
Soft delete
Nikolay and Michael discuss soft deletion in Postgres — what it means, several use cases, some implementation options, and which implementations suit which use cases. ...
Should we use foreign keys?
Nikolay and Michael discuss foreign keys in Postgres — what they are, their benefits, their overhead, some edge cases to be aware of, some improvements coming, and whe...
pgvectorscale
Nikolay is joined by Mat Arye and John Pruitt, from Timescale, to discuss their new extension pgvectorscale and high-performance vector search in Postgres more general...
To 100TB, and beyond!
Michael and Nikolay are joined by three special guests for episode 100 who have all scaled Postgres to significant scale — Arka Ganguli from Notion, Sammy Steele from ...
Full text search
Nikolay and Michael discuss full text search in Postgres — some of the history, some of the features, and whether it now makes sense to try to replace or combine it wi...
Minor releases
Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres minor releases — how the schedule works, options for upgrading to them, and the importance of reading the release notes. Here are ...
Custom vs generic plan
Nikolay and Michael discuss custom and generic planning in prepared statements — how it works, how issues can present themselves, some ways to view the generic plan, a...
LIMIT vs Performance
Nikolay and Michael discuss LIMIT in Postgres — what it does, how it can help with performance, and an interesting example where adding it can actually hurt performanc...
Buffers II (the sequel)
Nikolay and Michael return to the topic of using the buffers explain parameter — with a new analogy, some (conspiracy) theories of why it's still not on by default, an...
Massive DELETEs
Nikolay and Michael discuss doing massive DELETE operations in Postgres — what can go wrong, how to prevent major issues, and some ideas to minimise their impact. Here...