Anniversary mailbag

Postgres FM

Nikolay and Michael celebrate the podcast's 1 year anniversary by going through several questions and suggestions received over the year.
Here are the questions and some links to things we mentioned:

• Question 1: Effect of wal_log_hints=on after bulk Deletes: Why next select runs slow and generated tons of WAL? https://twitter.com/dmx551/status/1598253188926570496
• wal_log_hints https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-wal.html#GUC-WAL-LOG-HINTS
• Exploring how SELECT Queries can produce disk writes https://blog.okmeter.io/postgresql-exploring-how-select-queries-can-produce-disk-writes-f36c8bee6b6f

• Question 2: How to get started reading PostgreSQL source code. Maybe a PostgreSQL style C reference guide to consult with for non C programmers https://twitter.com/andatki/status/1578088843940593678
• So, you want to be a developer? https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/So,_you_want_to_be_a_developer%3F
• GitHub search https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Apostgres%2Fpostgres+wal_log_hints&type=code
• The Internals of PostgreSQL (by Hironobu SUZUKI) https://www.interdb.jp/pg/
• PostgreSQL 14 Internals (by Egor Rogov) https://postgrespro.com/community/books/internals

• Question 3: Isolation Levels Primer/Strategies — their uses in different scenarios, battle tested strategies and insights, performance tradeoffs, edge cases to consider at scale (with replication and sharding, etc.) I remember reading some interesting stuff on the jepsen analysis https://jepsen.io/analyses/postgresql-12.3 about Postgres's Serializable Isolation Level behaving more like Snapshot Isolation. Has this type of behavior or another one similar to this affected you or your clients in any significant way?
• Transaction Isolation https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/transaction-iso.html
• What developers find surprising about Postgres transactions https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/isolation-levels/

• Question 4: Data encryption in Postgres
• Cybertec Transparent Data Encryption https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/products/postgresql-transparent-data-encryption/
• EDB Transparent Data Encryption https://www.enterprisedb.com/docs/tde/latest/

• Question 5: Migration from other DBMSs
• PostgreSQL transition/migration guide https://github.com/postgresql-transition-guide/guide

• Question 6: Latest failover best practices
• Patroni https://github.com/zalando/patroni

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is brought to you by:

• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai
• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard

With special thanks to:

• Jessie Draws for the amazing artwork