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Bruce Momjian
Personal blog · momjian.usdataprogramming
Bruce Momjian's personal blog at momjian.us covers data and programming. Since 2007, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 66 times, most often “Postgres Internals Presentations”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Bruce Momjian's personal homepage
Most-linked posts?
- Postgres Internals Presentations3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-10-16
- MVCC Unmasked (2011) [pdf]2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-07-27
- The future of Postgres sharding [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-03
- PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-26
- Yandex Completes 3 Year Migration from Oracle to Postgres2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-29
- Who's in Charge?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-11
- /main/presentations/internals.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-24
What Hacker News says?
Just to keep it in memory? Postgres does this already-- it will put tables or parts of tables in memory to speed up reads [1]. [1] Source: https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/hw_performance/
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/hw_performance/
on “Why we lost Uber as a user”Submitted PostgreSQL community impact of 2nd Quadrant purchase as a story · 300 points
HN discussionHow deep do you want to go Bruce Momjian has a ton of talks on internals and other advanced topics so if you want to dig deep would highly recommend them : https://momjian.us/
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on “PostgreSQL 10 Released”Submitted Mastering PostgreSQL Administration [pdf] as a story · 170 points
HN discussionYou can find more detailed explanation from Bruce Momjian's site. (From page 64: https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/mvcc.pdf )
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/mvcc.pdf
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”Submitted Postgresql 9.2 will have boat-loads of performance enhancements as a story · 156 points
HN discussionAs I know, not every updates rewrite indexes in PG. It has single page clean up and HOT (heap only tuple) update optimization. Please refer to 64~ page of https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/mvcc.pdf .
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/mvcc.pdf
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”Submitted Major features of PostgreSQL 9.6 [pdf] as a story · 126 points
HN discussionI haven't fully read it (yet), but based on a quick scan of a few chapters, it looks like a dense but well-written introduction. Some additional resources I'd recommend if you're interested: Designing Data-Intensive Applications is a fantastic place to start if you're interested in the intersection of databases & distributed systems: https://dataintensive.net/ The Architecture of Open-Source Applications book has a…
Comment linking /main/presentations/internals.html
on “Foundations of Databases (1995)”Submitted Postgres Now the Default Database for Mac OS X Server as a story · 86 points
HN discussionUsually an RDBMS like PostgreSQL is used in an environment that has a different usage pattern than search. SOLR can take advantage of specializing for that type of usage. However, Russia's largest search engine, Yandex, seems to like PG http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2016.html#September_28_2...
Comment linking /main/blogs/pgblog/2016.html
on “PostgreSQL 9.6 Released”Submitted I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1 as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI would highly recommend talks by Bruce Momjian https://momjian.us/ he has separate talks on pretty much everything related to PG + All The Dirt On Vacuum talk by Jim Nasby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8nErzxPJjQ
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on “The internals of PostgreSQL”Submitted MVCC Unmasked (2011) [pdf] as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI think it's to a degree a function of significant volume of high quality material available in the open. It's hard to sell a book when you can go to Bruce Momjian's site https://momjian.us and get access to a ton of information and that is just one resource.
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on “Mastering PostgreSQL in Application Development”Submitted PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning (2010) as a story · 39 points
HN discussionIt's not the same format, but here's a few slide decks from Bruce Momjian's site, describing PostgreSQL's internals: https://momjian.us/main/presentations/internals.html
Comment linking /main/presentations/internals.html
on “The Architecture of Open Source Applications”Submitted The future of Postgres sharding [pdf] as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI love the partitioning improvements in PostgreSQL 12 https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/partitioning-enhancement... We are planning to use them for GitLab.com, particularly for the events table. More information is at https://www.percona.com/blog/2019/05/24/an-overview-of-shard... (including a comparison to MongoDB) and https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/sharding.pdf
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/sharding.pdf
on “PostgreSQL 12”Submitted NoSQL Databases as the New Scripting Language as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> For some types of software, we really do not want students doing it, for free or otherwise. There are whole classes of software, like database engines , that are non-obvious and require many years of real-world domain experience before it is plausible that someone will design a competent, scalable architecture and implementation. Of course as with all things the situation is more nuanced than this. Since you menti…
Comment linking /main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html
on ““Open source” is not broken”Submitted Postgres 10 Feature Presentation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is really awesome. I've spent a ton of time optimizing high throughput PG instances. Every time one of my optimizations failed it was from an incomplete understanding of the physical storage layer and/or MVCC. These 2 docs really help with a deeper understanding if you want to learn more: http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/internalpics.pdf http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/mvcc.pdf
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/mvcc.pdf
on “Introduction to PostgreSQL physical storage”Submitted Yandex Completes 3 Year Migration from Oracle to Postgres as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnother feature that should probably be on that list is Common Table Expressions: https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/cte.pdf (I still frequently run into people who work a lot with SQL that don't use CTEs, though less than before :)
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/cte.pdf
on “PostgreSQL Features You May Not Have Tried but Should”Submitted Postgres Internals Presentations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis looks to be an excellent, thorough resource on MVCC in Postgres. Here are some others: Chapter 13 of the Postgres official docs -> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/mvcc-intro.ht... Concurrency Deep Dive talk @ PostgresOpen 2017 -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxhBkBNxvR0 There is a wealth of good, informative, high signal/noise ratio talks at the PostgresOpen 2017, encourage you to check it out…
Comment linking /main/writings/pgsql/internalpics.pdf
on “The Internals of Postgres – Concurrency Control”Submitted PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere's the description for this PDF from the author's website: https://momjian.us/main/presentations/administration.html Mastering PostgreSQL Administration This talk is designed for PostgreSQL administrators. It covers all aspects of PostgreSQL administration, including installation, security, file structure, configuration, reporting, backup, daily maintenance, monitoring activity, disk space computations, and disa…
Comment linking /main/presentations/administration.html
on “Mastering PostgreSQL Administration [pdf]”Submitted First draft of PostgreSQL 17 release notes as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
