Nikolay Samokhvalov
Founder of Postgres AI
Appears in 116 Episodes
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 ...
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 some ...
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 to ...
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. He...
Stop and start Postgres faster
In this episode (recorded live on YouTube), Nikolay discusses Postgres shutdown and startup times – how to troubleshoot them and, when needed, optimize. Some extra th...
Backups
Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres backups — why we need them, what the options are, whether a dump is a backup or not, and some considerations for lowering RPO and ...
Postgres 16
Nikolay and Michael discuss the release of PostgreSQL 16 — the most important new features, what they mean for us as users, whether and when to upgrade, and more. Here...
Logical replication
Nikolay and Michael discuss logical replication — some history, initialization, change data capture, how to scale it, some limitiations, and ways that it is getting be...
Our favourite v16 feature
Nikolay and Michael discuss their favourite feature each from the upcoming PostgreSQL 16 release. Here are some links to some things they mentioned:v16 draft release n...
Connections
Nikolay and Michael discuss connections — the options, security and performance tradeoffs, and a few other things to be aware of. Here are some links to some things th...
Decoupled storage and compute
Nikolay and Michael discuss a listener question — about products that take Postgres and transform it to something that decouples compute from storage (RDS Aurora, GC A...
Self-managing
Nikolay and Michael discuss self-managing Postgres — both the practicalities of doing so, as well as some managed-service style tooling. Here are some links to some t...
Sharding
Nikolay and Michael discuss sharding Postgres — what it means, why and when it's needed, and the available options right now. Here are some links to some things they ...