Postgres Internals For Operators
MVCC, vacuum, and the planner you cannot ignore
Once your Postgres instance crosses a few hundred GB, the manual stops being enough. This book walks through MVCC garbage, vacuum strategies, the planner's cost model, WAL volume control, replication slot management, and the actual contents of pg_stat views you have been ignoring. Includes diagnostic queries you can paste into a console during an incident.
Mateo writes the manuals that DBAs trade between teams like contraband. He worked on Postgres internals and now ships the books he could not find when learning.
- Pages
- 376
- Edition
- 2nd Edition
- Language
- English
- Level
- advanced
- ISBN
- 978-1-99999-011-1
- Published
- October 2025
Reviewed by three working engineers at peer publications before publication. We do not publish first drafts.
What you'll find inside.
- 01MVCC, Concretely
- 02The Vacuum Process
- 03The Planner's Cost Model
- 04WAL Volume Control
- 05Logical Replication In Practice
- 06Indexes That Survive Drift
- 07Diagnostic pg_stat Queries
- 08Upgrading Without Downtime
5.0 / 5
218 verified readers
Closest thing to apprenticing under a Postgres committer
I have been doing Postgres ops for nine years and still learned things. The vacuum chapter alone explains incidents I have suffered through.
