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// 2h agoTUTORIAL
Hatchet co-founder drops practical Postgres survival guide
Alexander Belanger, Co-Founder of Hatchet, shares a comprehensive Postgres survival guide distilled from two years of production experience. The post covers schema design, query optimization, handling migrations, connection management, understanding the query planner, tuning autovacuum, and using advanced features to help startups prevent their databases from failing.
// ANALYSIS
This survival guide provides practical, hard-won insights into operating PostgreSQL in production at startup scale.
- –Emphasizes that ORMs can become a bottleneck at scale, requiring engineers to break the abstraction and write raw SQL for optimizations.
- –Highlights the critical importance of `CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY` to prevent table locking and downtime during index creation.
- –Explains the often-misunderstood query planner and the necessity of keeping table statistics up to date via `ANALYZE` and autovacuum.
- –Shares advanced patterns like `FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED` for implementing robust queuing directly within Postgres.
// TAGS
postgresqldatabasescalingstartupsqloptimization
DISCOVERED
2h ago
2026-07-22
PUBLISHED
6h ago
2026-07-22
RELEVANCE
8/ 10
AUTHOR
abelanger
