The Complete
PostgreSQL Deep Dive
17 production-grade topics covering everything from schema design to replication, MVCC to Row-Level Security — built for engineers who want to understand Postgres at the internals level.
Foundations
Database Design
Normalization forms, ER modeling, primary & foreign keys, and choosing the right schema shape for relational data.
OLTP Design
Designing for high-concurrency transactional workloads — write patterns, hot-row avoidance, and denormalization trade-offs.
Data Types
Postgres native types: numeric, text, temporal, arrays, enums, ranges, UUIDs, and when to reach for each.
Constraints
CHECK, UNIQUE, NOT NULL, EXCLUDE, deferred constraints, and enforcing data integrity at the schema level.
Views
Simple views, updatable views, materialized views, and refresh strategies for pre-computed query results.
Concurrency & Internals
Transactions
ACID guarantees, isolation levels, savepoints, and how transaction boundaries affect concurrent readers and writers.
Locking
Row-level vs table-level locks, advisory locks, deadlock detection, and diagnosing lock contention in production.
Internals & MVCC
Heap pages, tuple visibility, xmin/xmax, the WAL, and how MVCC enables non-blocking reads without sacrificing consistency.
Performance
Indexing
B-Tree, Hash, GIN, GiST, BRIN index types, partial and expression indexes, covering indexes, and index bloat.
Query Optimization
EXPLAIN ANALYZE, planner cost model, statistics, join strategies, CTE vs subquery trade-offs, and rewriting slow queries.
Partitioning
Range, list, and hash partitioning — pruning, attaching/detaching partitions, and managing time-series tables at scale.
Advanced Features
Ops & Production
Replication
Streaming vs logical replication, WAL shipping, hot standby, replication slots, and setting up read replicas.
Backup & Recovery
pg_dump, pg_basebackup, PITR with WAL archiving, recovery targets, and testing your restore process before disaster hits.
VACUUM
Dead tuple reclamation, autovacuum tuning, table bloat, visibility maps, freeze cycles, and transaction ID wraparound.
Security & RLS
Roles, privileges, GRANT/REVOKE, Row-Level Security policies, column-level encryption, and auditing data access.