Nikolay Samokhvalov
Founder of Postgres AI
Appears in 132 Episodes
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 ...
Data types
Nikolay and Michael discuss data types in PostgreSQL — including system types, choosing between types, types provided by extensions, and more. Here are some links to ...
High availability
Nikolay and Michael discuss HA (high availability) — what it means, tools and techniques for maximising it, while going through some of the more common causes of downt...
Beginner tips
Nikolay and Michael discuss 10 beginner tips Nikolay recently shared — they go into a bit more detail on each, and even disagree a little on one or two! Here are some...
Connection poolers
Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres connection poolers — when and why we need them, the king that is PgBouncer, and the many new pretenders to the throne. Here are li...
Anniversary mailbag
Nikolay and Michael celebrate the podcast's 1 year anniversary by going through several questions and suggestions received over the year. Here are the questions and so...
pg_upgrade: the tricky and dangerous parts
Nikolay (alone, again) reveals some issues that might hit those who perform major PostgreSQL upgrades with minimal downtime.Links:- "Upgrades" – PostgresFM episode 037...
UUID
Lonely Nikolay discusses the performance aspects of using UUID for primary keys. Here are links to a few things I mentioned: "postgresql" posts on HN, most popular las...
Memory
Nikolay and Michael discuss memory in PostgreSQL — how it works, important settings, and how to go about tuning them. Here are links to a few things we mentioned: Reso...
Extensions
Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres extensions — what they are, how they affect your decisions around Postgres, and some things to keep in mind when using them. Here ...
Zero-downtime migrations
Nikolay and Michael discuss zero-downtime schema migrations — why they're a challenge, a variety of different cases, and some things you can do to achieve them. Here a...
Parallelism
Nikolay and Michael discuss parallelism — both parallel query execution and other parallel operations. Here are links to a few things we mentioned: Parallel query (doc...
Corruption
Nikolay and Michael discuss database corruption — various types, how they can come about, and what to do (and not do) if you come across it. Here are links to a few t...
pg_stat_statements
Nikolay and Michael discuss pg_stat_statements — why everyone should use it, but also some downsides! Here are links to a few things we mentioned: pg_stat_statements (...
auto_explain
Nikolay and Michael discuss auto_explain — what it is, how it can help, and how to check it's overhead. Here are links to a few things we mentioned: auto_explain (docs...