I Learned About PostgreSQL From That
Friday, October 02 · 15:00–15:50
Our most valuable lessons rarely come from reading the manual—they come from the trenches when queries inexplicably time out, applications run out of memory, or performance degrades without an obvious cause.
"I learned about PostgreSQL from that" is dedicated to real-world war stories and hidden architectural quirks that silently crush performance. We'll unpack critical production incidents from the initial alert to the root cause, revealing the underlying PostgreSQL mechanics they exposed.
Attendees will discover:
The Sub-Transaction Trap: Why harmless EXCEPTION blocks in code can overflow the PGPROC array and severely throttle throughput.
The Memory Spike Mystery: How default JDBC fetch sizes invisibly consume massive memory, and the simple tuning to fix it.
The Cloud Disconnect: Why long-standing defaults for parameters like random_page_cost actively penalize modern SSD environments.
The Vacuum Vortex: How obscure MVCC behaviors, high water mark locking, and constraint violations generate massive database overhead.
Join me as we dissect these scenarios. You'll leave equipped with actionable configuration strategies, application design patterns, and custom diagnostic queries to ensure you never learn these PostgreSQL lessons the hard way.
