A large majority of computer systems have some state and are likely to depend on a storage system. My knowledge on databases accumulated over time, but along the way our design mistakes caused data loss and outages. In data-heavy systems, databases are at the core of system design goals and tradeoffs. Even though it is impossible to ignore how databases work, the problems that application developers foresee and experience will often be just the tip of the iceberg. In this series, I’m sharing a few insights I specifically found useful for developers who are not specialized in this domain.

the lack of meaningful dissent left me a bit bothered. No software is perfect, so exactly what are PostgreSQL’s imperfections?

I’ve been hands-on with PostgreSQL in production since 2003 with deployments ranging from small (gigabytes) to modest to very large (~petabyte). My perspective is largely from building and running systems that are at least intended to be continuously available. Needless to say, I have gained first-hand experience with PostgreSQL’s particular idiosyncrasies through some painful production issues over the years.