S2E1: Andrew Atkinson, Software Engineer and Author

Hacking Postgres

Andrew Atkinson is a Software Engineer who specializes in building high-performance web applications using PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails. He wrote the book ‘High-Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’, published by Pragmatic Programmers in 2024.

Our discussion with Andrew spans the technical challenges of sharding and the concurrent evolution of Rails and Postgres. We'll pay homage to influential resources like Railscast, debate Rails' database tooling limitations, and discover tips from Andrew's new book.

In this episode we explore:

• Why newer developers favor Postgres over MySQL
• How Postgres might become a multi-primary database in the future
• The complexities of database decisions in a Rails environment
• Postgres innovations, such as composite primary keys and common table expressions, being supported from Active Record – the ORM for Ruby on Rails
• Key insights from writing ‘High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’

Links mentioned:

Andrew Atkinson on LinkedIn

Andrew’s Blog

Newsletter

PGCasts

RailsCasts

‘High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’ by Andrew Atkinson

Github rideshare

Postgres FM

Andrew Aktkinson’s interview on Postgres FM

Andrew Atkinson’s interview on Remote Ruby

Remote Ruby Podcast

GitHub doc: clarify logical decoding's deadlock of system tables

GitHub doc: Doc: fix grammatical errors for enable_partitionwise_aggregate

GitHub Convert README to Markdown