I was writing an article for Infoq on the topic less spoken costs of managed databases and one question that the editor asked is how much margin RDS makes compared to running a Postgres instance on EC2? That intrigued me and honestly, I never did the math so far. I have been using AWS-managed databases since 2016 and I thought what’s a better time to do an analysis of Cloud cost than today ?

I was trying to play with Phil’s pgtam and the first step is that to install Postgres version 16. Sounds fairly innocous. When I ran configure, I was getting the below error: checking for icu-uc icu-i18n... no configure: error: ICU library not found If you have ICU already installed, see config.log for details on the failure. It is possible the compiler isn't looking in the proper directory. Use --without-icu to disable ICU support.

I kept hearing about the term wire protocol especially Postgres wire protocol in the recent days (Looking at you cockroachdb, yugabytedb - in a good way) but never really quite understood it. Decided to implement something simple in Go to understand it better. As always, if you find anything wrong or I misunderstood please correct me. In simple terms, “wire” - something over network generally (but PG also supports over domain sockets)

Citus: Distributed PostgreSQL for Data-Intensive Applications paper can be downloaded here. Recently, our team got a request to provide a solution to shard Postgres. One of the solutions that we discussed was Citus. I have heard about the product and seen their blogs related to Postgres in the past but never used it. I thought it would be fun to read about its internal workings. If you find something wrong on the notes, please send a pull request.

TL;DR: Connect with people whom you admire. Things can take longer so stay in touch. At the right moment, don’t hesitate to ask. I recently became an Engineering Manager after being an Individual Contributor for almost 8 years. If you are interested to know more about the reasoning behind the change. As like many other jobs in Tech, there is no formal training for an Engineering Manager. Reminds me of my dad’s saying “How do you teach one to swim?

Capturing thoughts from https://twitter.com/viggy28/status/1530800893842444289 When you are doing major DML changes, other than locks one more thing to keep in mind is replication lag. Especially if you use your replicas in hot standby mode. When you need to delete most of the records in a massive table, its better to create a new table and just copy the records that you need to preserve. When you need to delete all the records in a massive table, just truncate it instead of deleting them.