Database Insights

2025 was the year databases competed on operational simplicity. Serverless databases matured, pgvector merged vector search into PostgreSQL, and CDC became standard infrastructure. Here's what mattered and what's next.

PostgreSQL WAL retention is a balancing act — too little and standbys fall behind; too much and you risk disk exhaustion. Here's how to configure wal_keep_size and manage replication slots safely.

Compare Liquibase and Flyway for production database schema management. Learn changelog formats, rollback strategies, team workflows, and CI/CD integration patterns.

Deploy Aurora Global Database for sub-second cross-region replication. Understand storage-level replication, planned failover vs unplanned, and write forwarding for read regions.

TiDB performs schema changes online without blocking reads or writes — using a distributed DDL queue across TiDB nodes. Here's how it works and how to monitor DDL jobs in production.

Five counterintuitive database performance truths every engineer gets wrong — over-indexing costs, N+1 queries, connection pool sizing, replica reads, and EXPLAIN limitations.

RDS MySQL audit logs stored in CloudWatch cost significantly more than S3 — and most teams don't need real-time log access. Here's how to export audit logs to S3 and cut your AWS bill.

Design Cassandra tables for time-series data that scale to billions of rows. Learn partition key design, clustering columns, TTL tombstone management, and bucket strategies.

MongoDB's Slot-Based Execution (SBE) engine introduced a plan cache memory leak affecting certain MongoDB versions — here's how to detect, mitigate, and fix it.

Configure pgBouncer correctly for your PostgreSQL workload. Compare transaction vs session pooling, size your pool correctly, and monitor pool health in production.

A critical bug in MongoDB 8.0 (SERVER-97368) affects TTL index behavior — causing documents to persist beyond expiration or delete prematurely. Here's how to detect and mitigate it.

Understand when MySQL JSON columns help and hurt performance. Learn functional indexes, JSON_TABLE, and when to migrate JSON to normalized columns.