Nikolay and Michael discuss ten dangerous Postgres related issues — ones that might be painful enough to get onto the CTO and even CEOs desk, and then what you can do proactively.

The ten issues discussed are:

Heavy lock contention
Bloat control and index maintenance
Lightweight lock contention
Transaction ID wraparound
4-byte integer PKs hitting the limit
Replication limits
Hard limits
Data loss
Poor HA choice (split brain)
Corruption of various kinds

Some previous episodes they mentioned that cover the issues in more detail:

PgDog https://postgres.fm/episodes/pgdog
Performance cliffs https://postgres.fm/episodes/performance-cliffs
Zero-downtime migrations https://postgres.fm/episodes/zero-downtime-migrations
Queues in Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/queues-in-postgres
Bloat https://postgres.fm/episodes/bloat
Index maintenance https://postgres.fm/episodes/index-maintenance
Subtransactions https://postgres.fm/episodes/subtransactions
Four million TPS https://postgres.fm/episodes/four-million-tps
Transaction ID wraparound https://postgres.fm/episodes/transaction-id-wraparound
pg_squeeze https://postgres.fm/episodes/pg_squeeze
synchronous_commit https://postgres.fm/episodes/synchronous_commit
Managed service support https://postgres.fm/episodes/managed-service-support

And finally, some other things they mentioned:

A great recent SQL Server-related podcast episode on tuning techniques https://kendralittle.com/2024/05/20/erik-darling-and-kendra-little-rate-sql-server-performance-tuning-techniques/
Postgres Indexes, Partitioning and LWLock:LockManager Scalability (blog post by Jeremy Schneider) https://ardentperf.com/2024/03/03/postgres-indexes-partitioning-and-lwlocklockmanager-scalability/
Do you vacuum everyday? (talk by Hannu Krosing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcRi8Z7rkPg
pg_stat_wal https://pgpedia.info/p/pg_stat_wal.html
The benefit of lz4 and zstd for Postgres WAL compression (Small Datum blog, Mark Callaghan) https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-benefit-of-lz4-and-zstd-for.html
Split-brain in case of network partition (CloudNativePG issue/discussion) https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg/discussions/7462

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

FFWD #267 mit Ledger-Manager Ian Rogers