Posts tagged #Operations
3 posts.
Bloat that won't come back: prevention, pg_repack, and PostgreSQL 19's REPACK
Some PostgreSQL bloat is self-healing. Some isn't. The kind that won't come back on its own — dead tuples sitting in regions of a table that no longer take writes — quietly inflates your storage bill, your backups, and your recovery time. Here's how to recognise it, prevent it with partitioning and fillfactor, and reclaim it with pg_repack today or REPACK in PostgreSQL 19.
"does not exist" in PostgreSQL: how to read the error and stop guessing
9:14 Tuesday morning. The deploy hit production and the user-lookup endpoint returns 500s with 'operator does not exist: text = uuid'. The column exists, the parameter is bound, the rollback is being drafted. PostgreSQL's resolver is telling you exactly what went wrong — almost nobody reads past the first line. How to read the message, and the five levers (cast, signature, schema, extension, quoting) that fix the family.
Inheriting a Postgres database
You inherited the database six months ago. Today the BI engineer needs SELECT on the analytics schema by 2pm — but the table the ETL created last week returns permission denied. A walk through the small PostgreSQL commands every team rediscovers under pressure, and the pattern that makes them compound when they all hit at once: ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES, pg_dump shapes, SHOW, numeric types, psql meta-commands, and the seams of running on RDS.