Deep dives on PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and more — performance tuning, high availability, migrations and production war stories from our DBAs.
90 articles
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 1 (June 4, 2026) brings parallel autovacuum, the native REPACK command for online table rebuilds, 2x faster inserts under foreign-key load, online logical replication without a restart, WAIT FOR LSN for read-your-writes consistency, and default changes (JIT off, lz4 TOAST, RADIUS removed). A DBA-focused walkthrough of what changed and what to test before GA.
A top-down playbook for high-performance MongoDB: measure with the profiler and explain(), model for access patterns, index by the ESR rule, keep the working set in the WiredTiger cache, pool connections, and scale reads with secondaries and sharding — with flow diagrams for each layer.
A repeatable, top-down method for tuning PostgreSQL: measure with pg_stat_statements, read plans with EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), fix queries and indexes before parameters, then tune memory, I/O, WAL, connection pooling, and autovacuum — with a ready-to-adapt postgresql.conf baseline.
Walk through PostgreSQL's multi-process architecture, shared/local memory layout, page-organized storage, MVCC tuple versioning, the WAL write path, the query execution pipeline, and physical + logical replication — all with ASCII flow diagrams that show how data and control actually move through the system.
Read SQL Server wait stats like a senior DBA: the four DMV sources, the eight wait types that cover 95% of incidents (PAGEIOLATCH, LCK_M, CXPACKET, WRITELOG…), and the remediation for each. A 30-minute diagnostic workflow from page to plan.
Explore the trade-offs between database normalization and denormalization for optimal performance. Learn when to normalize for data integrity and when to denormalize for query speed.
Leverage MySQL 8.4 InnoDB parallel DDL for faster schema changes. Learn parallel index creation, online DDL improvements, and reduced maintenance windows.
Choose the optimal EC2 instance for your database workload. Compare R, X, I, and Graviton families with real-world benchmarks and cost-performance analysis.
Build blazing-fast analytics with ClickHouse columnar database. Learn MergeTree engine, data modeling, query optimization, and cluster deployment strategies.
StarRocks is an open-source MPP analytics database. This 2026 guide covers FE/BE/CN architecture, the four table models, vectorized execution, and when to choose StarRocks over ClickHouse.
MySQL wait_timeout, net_read_timeout, innodb_lock_wait_timeout and max_execution_time — production tuning rules and the HikariCP alignment trick that prevents 'communications link failure' errors.
Complete guide to StarRocks monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana. Covers resource saturation, cluster health, and application availability alerts with PromQL expressions and runbooks.
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