Nikolay Samokhvalov
Founder of Postgres AI
Appears in 100 Episodes
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...
Logical replication common issues
Nikolay and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur, CEO and Co-founder of PeerDB, to discuss how to overcome several logical replication issues. They discuss the protocol...
Don't do this
Nikolay and Michael discuss several "Don't do this" lists about Postgres — picking out their favourite items, as well as some contentious ones that could be clearer, o...
Search
Nikolay and Michael have a high-level discussion on all things search — touching on full-text search, semantic search, and faceted search. They discuss what comes in P...
Health check
Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres health checks — what they are, things to include, how often makes sense, and whether improvements to Postgres would increase or de...
superuser
Nikolay and Michael discuss the superuser role in PostgreSQL — what it is, how and when it shouldn’t be used, and whether most cloud providers are right to not give us...
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 isn’t...
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 ...
work_mem
Happy holidays! Today's topic is work_mem — how it's used and how to tune it. Related post: https://x.com/samokhvalov/status/1740813478150189172?s=46&t=HSxrW86NZqzPQP9...
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 so...
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:Subtrans...
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 ...