Shayon Mukherjee shares some tips about scaling in PostgreSQL:
“Postgres was great when we started but now that our service is being used heavily we are running into a lot of ‘weird’ issues”
This sentiment is frequently echoed by CTOs and senior engineers at high-growth startups when I speak with them.
Scaling PostgreSQL successfully doesn’t always require a full team of DBAs and experts. The beauty of PostgreSQL is that solutions often lie within the database itself – by rethinking your data access patterns from first principles, you can solve many business problems at scale.
In this post, I’ll address some common “weird” issues I’ve encountered and explore solutions that work at scale.
I like some of them, though I’m not a fan of eliminating or delaying foreign key constraints, as those are important for data quality. I’m not knowledgeable enough in PostgreSQL administration to have a strong opinion on these, however.