Database performance is likely the biggest factor in whether your application is slow or not, and yet too many developers don't take the time to properly understand how their database works. In today's episode, we have Andrew Atkinson who just released a new book, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails. Andrew is one of those "Accidental DBAs" that fell into learning about database optimization at his job and ended up getting pretty dang good at it.

In this episode, We hit Andrew with a bunch of questions about using Postgres properly, including how tight to your schema should be, how to handle Postgres operations, and how to think about performance testing with Postgres. We also got into some aspects about the process of writing a book and what he recommends for others.

If you're building an application with a relational database, this book will help you. It has real code repositories so you can walk through the steps yourself, and it teaches the concepts in addition to the practical aspects so you understand what's happening.