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Making Postgres scale

make Postgres scale Mar 13th, 2025 Lev Kokotov Postgres scales. No other two words that I’ve ever heard of, produced more controversy.

A lot of people believe, against all odds, and marketing campaigns by Big NoSQL, that technology you know is better than the devil you just heard pitched at the Engineering Leadership meeting. I’m talking about that engineering spirit that looks at a problem, while under executive fire, and instead of running into the hands of your nearest sales team with big promises (but little facts about your use case), solves it using first principles. We took a failing database, while it was serving about 100,000 users per second, ran dozens of scary looking (and mostly undocumented) commands to get it to keep that replication slot open while we snapshot it, restore it 6 different ways, and truncate most of the data to get it in sync with the new sharding scheme.

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