PostgreSQL Query Rewriting Techniques The previous articles in this series covered performance problems you fix by adding indexes, restructuring joins, or tuning memory. This one is about the queries where the plan is "fine" — every node is doing something reasonable — but the query itself is asking the wrong question, producing unnecessarily large intermediate results or forcing the planner dow
We Ditched Terraform 1.10 for CloudFormation: Reducing IaC Complexity for Our Small AWS Team We’re a 4-person engineering team managing 32 AWS resources across dev, staging, and production environments for a B2B SaaS product. For 18 months, we relied on Terraform 1.10 to manage our infrastructure as code (IaC). But by Q3 2024, the overhead of maintaining Terraform outweighed its benefits for our
This section is the map for the rest of the book. The five stages introduced in the 1.1 chapter overview (parse, analyze/rewrite, plan, portal, execute) are traced here through the actual code: which functions implement each stage, and in what order they get called. The mechanics of each of the five stages are unpacked in later chapters. Here, only the skeleton matters: how a backend starts up, ho
PostgreSQL Internals · Chapter 1 Query Processing Suppose a client sends SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1. The path that single line travels before coming back as a result row is longer than you might expect. Inside the PostgreSQL backend, that SQL goes through a five-stage pipeline. Backend entry and dispatch. The backend receives the message from the client and decides which processing path it s
SQL is widely known for data querying and manipulation but systems do grow; data becomes larger; processes become repetitive and operations become sensitive. SQL has some features which enables it to be considered a fully fledged programming language. Some of the features which I discuss in this article are procedures, functions and transactions. Each of these concepts serve distinct purposes. Sto
Introduction Placing RDS in a private subnet protects it from unauthorized external access — but it also means you can no longer connect directly from your developer machine. This article walks you through a step-by-step guide to securely connect to a private-subnet RDS (PostgreSQL) instance using AWS Client VPN. Developer PC │ │ UDP 443 (TLS / Mutual Certificate Authentication) ▼ Client
Billing code is the most dangerous place to have subtle bugs. It rarely crashes — it just silently does the wrong thing. Here are two we found and fixed in ClipCrafter, an AI video clip extraction tool. We track how many seconds of video each user processes per day to enforce plan limits. The original increment looked like this: const { data } = await db .from("users") .select("daily_usage_sec
Power BI is a powerful business analytics service developed by Microsoft that empowers users to visualise data and share interactive dashboards across their organisation. While Power BI can handle data from various sources, its true potential is unleashed when connected to robust data sources like SQL databases. SQL databases—such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server—are the industry standard for