Practical engineering tips, design theory and performance breakdowns — written for developers and founders who like their advice tested in production.
Filtering by tag #postgresql — clear
Which free database should you pick for a side project? A comparison of managed Postgres, MongoDB and edge SQLite options, with the limits that matter and how to stay portable.
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The choice isn't about which database is modern or fast. It's about the shape of your data and how you'll query it. A practical comparison and a simple decision process.
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INNER, LEFT, RIGHT and FULL joins, the anti-join trick for "find rows with no match", and why joins sometimes multiply your rows. Clear examples you can run against any SQL database.
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Schema changes cause more scary deploys than almost anything else. How migrations work, the rules that keep them safe, and the expand-and-contract pattern for changes with zero downtime.
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Backups are only real if you can restore them. The 3-2-1 rule, logical dumps vs point-in-time recovery, how often to back up, and the restore drill that most teams skip until it's too late.
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A query that runs in 4ms locally but takes 9 seconds in production usually has the same cause: a function like LOWER() or TRIM() wrapped around an indexed column. Learn why this makes queries non-sargable, how to spot it in your execution plan, and five engine-specific fixes — from functional indexes to PostgreSQL's citext type.
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Same code. Same .env. Works on my Linux box, dies on the Windows server with ECONNREFUSED ::1:3306. Here's what localhost actually does under the hood, why 127.0.0.1 is not always the same thing, and the rules I now follow in every .env file.
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One missing index can turn a 5ms query into a 5 second one. What indexes are, how to read EXPLAIN, how composite indexes really work, and when an index makes things worse.
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