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5 Hard Problems Companies May Need Consulting Help On for their PostgreSQL Databases

via jbranchaud@gmail.com

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samokhvalov_postgresql-activity-7316278118468489216-h_qr
PostgreSQL Software Consulting

Nikolay points out some of the things that are uniquely hard and common challenges for many PostgreSQL databases. This means it is also a good list of things to demonstrate expertise in because companies will likely need consulting help with each of these.

Five hard problems in #PostgreSQL:

  1. LWLock contention of various kinds when various buffers overflow / thresholds exceeded
  2. no simple path to sharding for OLTP
  3. single-threaded processes (eg replication bottlenecks)
  4. partitioning requires a lot of effort
  5. upgrades too

I've done a number of PostgreSQL major version upgrades for companies. They are usually pretty uneventful because of how careful Postgres is with backward-compatibility. That said, they need to be carefully planned and executed to avoid or minimize downtime.

I explored partitioning with one client who had a massive events table. It is awkward and challenging to set up a partition after the fact. Ideally, you've designed the schema with partitioning from the start. In lieu of partitioning, we decided to do a swap-and-drop migration to remove hundreds of millions of old, unneeded rows.