Nikolay Samokhvalov
Founder of Postgres AI
Appears in 147 Episodes
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 ...
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 ...