Top all-time · #1133
Christophe Pettus
Personal blog · thebuild.com/blogdataprogramming
Christophe Pettus writes the build, a personal blog at thebuild.com about data and programming. Since 2009, 60 different Hacker News readers have linked it 77 times, most often “PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Christophe Pettus's PostgreSQL talks and blog posts, which cover scaling, performance against MongoDB, and the Uber replication debate. They are often pointed to as introductions to advanced Postgres.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Described as 'a lot of really good information', 'a really great set of slides' and 'definitely a worth reading'; also 'very informative' and 'interesting'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A technical blog by Christophe Pettus
Most-linked posts?
- PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf]6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-07-02
- Pgxbackup: Continuity Support for PgBackRest4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-05-02
- The Importance of Max_wal_size3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-30
- A PostgreSQL response to Uber [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-28
- PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-02
- Don’t Assume PostgreSQL Is Slow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-30
- PostgreSQL When It's Not Your Job2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-04
- Securing PostgreSQL [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-03
- /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-22
- /presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-06
What Hacker News says?
Further reference material: - PgSQL mailing list thread discussing Uber's post: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/579795DF.10502%40comma... - Slides from "A PostgreSQL Response to Uber", a talk that provides the PgSQL-perspective counterarguments to the Uber post: http://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf [PDF] - Previous HN discussion on the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222721…
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “PostgreSQL 10 Released”Submitted Securing PostgreSQL [pdf] as a story · 241 points
HN discussionIt's not a book, but Christophe Pettus' blog ( https://thebuild.com/blog ) has a lot of really good information. In particular, his talk "Breaking PostgreSQL at Scale" goes through the problems you run into as you hit different levels of scale ( https://thebuild.com/presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf )
Comment linking /presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf
on “Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)”Submitted A PostgreSQL response to Uber [pdf] as a story · 142 points
HN discussionThanks for the feedback, when initially creating the performance area there weren't a lot of great references. There's now one really great set of slides from a talk that gives you the basics of configuring your own postgresql.conf, I'll make sure to add it soon as an additional reference - http://thebuild.com/presentations/not-your-job.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/not-your-job.pdf
on “Postgres Guide”Submitted Don’t Assume PostgreSQL Is Slow as a story · 77 points
HN discussionSee slide 44 here: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2... GIN indexes are big, but Mongo's indexes are bigger than all other PostgreSQL indexes, and Mongo also requires much more space for the data.
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “Hstore development for 9.4 release”Submitted JSON vs hstore as a story · 36 points
HN discussionSee also the PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database slides (includes several benchmarks vs MongoDB): http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2...
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “Hstore development for 9.4 release”Submitted A PostgreSQL Response to Uber as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI would like to quote PostgreSQL Experts (this applies to all DBs): FULL DISK ENCRYPTION IS USELESS. [1] FDE protects against… • … theft of the media. • That’s it. • That is about 0.00000002% of the actual intrusions that you have to worry about. • Easy rule: If psql can read it in cleartext, it’s not secure. • (It’s a great idea for laptops, of course.) And then it recommends: "Always encrypt specific columns, not…
Comment linking /presentations/pgconfeu-2016-securing-postgresql.pdf
on “Equifax CEO to Congress: Not Sure We Are Encrypting Data”Submitted Sixteen Locks Ought to Be Enough for Anybody as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis should solve one of the problems Uber had with PostgreSQL reported by Christophe Pettus back in 2017[1]. 1- https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf Previous discussion from 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16526623
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “Zheap – Reinvented PostgreSQL Storage”Submitted UUID vs. BIGSERIAL for Primary Keys as a story · 13 points
HN discussionIn the case of Postgres, it has indexable json and hstore datatypes that enable the use of a table as a key-value store. And, it has good performance when compared to MongoDB: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2... So in this case, it is using Postgres as intended by the datatype designers. May be you are thinking of the Ruby Rails ORMs.
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “Reddit: Lessons Learned From Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month”Submitted PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf] as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAlso https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “Ask HN: PostgreSQL or MySQL?”Submitted Why I Resigned as Djangocon US 2014 Program Chair as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI found this talk by Christophe Pettus [1] very informative. The title is somewhat misleading as most of the talk has little to do with Python, but it's a good introduction to more advanced Postgres concepts. Also available in PDF form [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uCxLCmzaG4 [2] http://thebuild.com/presentations/pycon-2014-pppp.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/pycon-2014-pppp.pdf
on “A list of PostgreSQL libraries, tools and resources”Submitted Django, PostgreSQL, and Transaction Management as a story · 8 points
HN discussionNot from heroku guys but definitely a worth reading http://thebuild.com/blog/2012/05/18/running-postgresql-on-aw...
Comment linking /blog/2012/05/18/running-postgresql-on-aws/
on “Postgres 9.2 – The Database You Helped Build”Submitted A PostgreSQL Replication Cheat-Sheet as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlso keep this in mind: http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/03/10/you-cannot-recover-from-...
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/10/you-cannot-recover-from-the-loss-of-a-tablespace/
on “How to Corrupt an SQLite Database File”Submitted PostgreSQL the PCI Compliant Database [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere was a bug related to replication; it was caught and fixed rather quickly at the time, but Uber still got bitten by it. See http://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL (2016)”Submitted PostgreSQL When It's Not Your Job as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLook at performance numbers: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2... Furthermore, consider that PG is pretty much an amazing RDBMS in addition to having a good document story.
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “How to Migrate 50M Records from Mongo to PostgreSQL in Less Than a Day”Submitted Unbreaking your Django Application as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPostgreSQL also has JSON support. You might want to check out Christphe Pettus's presentation on this subject: http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/07/02/postgresql-as-a-nosql-da...
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/02/postgresql-as-a-nosql-database/
on “Schema-less is usually a lie”Submitted 10 Easy Ways to Destroy Performance as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
