Andrew Atkinson

Why I Love Relational Databases Software engineers believe that there is value in understanding how to make a decision. We always need to decide which decisions we’ll…

my love letter to relational databases

postgres, pls be mine: check yes or no

x86.wtf/why-i-love-r...

High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails: Reliable, Scalab… Build faster, more reliable Rails apps by taking the be…

📚 In the last few weeks, 3 new Goodreads ratings for High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails. Thank you!

⭐️ 23 ratings / 6 reviews — 4.78

www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...

Big news -- @jremsikjr.bsky.social of Flagrant has officially announced XO Ruby! 💫

Taking place across six U.S. cities between September and October, XO Ruby is a series of traveling events that, for locals, won't require a plane ticket and hotel stay...

PGDay Lowlands 2025 A 1-day PostgreSQL community conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

🎉 For the second year in a row, we're hosting a challenge to test PostgreSQL 18 pre-releases

🧪 Help improve Postgres by testing the beta versions. In return, you could win a free ticket to PgDay Lowlands and earn your spot on the legendary Wall of Testers

Details: 2025.pgday.nl/testing-pg

I'm going to be speaking at @xoruby.com Atlanta on September 13th. XO Ruby is a brand-new (traveling) single-day Ruby conference. If you're a Rubyist in the southeastern US, you should check it out! (And if not, take a look at other 5 stops this fall.)

Great post showing a useful, practical debugging tactic, and putting the findings into the broader context.

New small blog post

"Measuring SELECT ... FOR UPDATE Latency in #PostgreSQL"

> Are queries slow because they’re waiting to acquire locks, or because they’re taking a long time to find the actual rows? :)

benoittgt.github.io/blog/postgre...

Thanks JP! I’ll be presenting on schema design, feature usage, and SQL related to building multitenancy in Postgres. Why, how, caveats, limits etc. I’ll have SQL and schema designs to share!

Honored to be presenting at PGConf NYC in a couple of months! Hope to see you there. #postgresql

bsky.app/profile/pgco...

Fast Tests, Clear Datasets with Oaken: for fixtures + factories + seeds. · Zoom · Luma Remember tests being fast? lol Your factories may have started easy, but now they're painful for your growing team. What about fixtures, could they save you?…

Come join our free gem walkthrough next Tuesday 👋

You'll see a new take on fixtures + factories + seeds, and gain a new perspective on your dev and test data.

It's live over Zoom, so you can ask questions too.

lu.ma/e9927y5m

Can confirm! 👆

YouTube video by Ruby Central RailsConf 2025 10 Costly Database Performance Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) by Andrew Atkinson

RailsConf talks are live. Would love your feedback!

Presentation page with more info and all the links: andyatkinson.com/10-mistakes

RailsConf 2025 10 Costly Database Performance Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) by Andrew Atkinson
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ8R...

Congrats JP! 👏

I don’t know the context but I like what you’re putting down here in this meme text. 😂

Thanks for being a reader! Let me know if I can help.

In this thread about temporary tables and pitfalls, I can say the book doesn't cover those, mainly because I hadn't had use cases and experience with them.

You could up the ante by having some “deploy without a feature flag, oops your non-scalable design took production down” whammies on this hypothetical wheel. 👹😅

Tmux has been a part of my local development workflow for a decade.

On remote servers when performing long running jobs (like a “create index concurrently” on a big table), running them within screen or tmux is a must! Smooth detach and reattach. 👌

I’ll bring a sweater!

Yes this is great information from the ClickHouse team.

I use ORMs when writing programs, raw SQL when doing analysis, debugging, or database admin.

The problem with raw SQL queries in code is that a) they don't compose well, and b) I still need to convert rows into objects somehow.

A multifaceted multitude of Postgres. 🐘🐘🐘

I'm collecting links to public Postgres-related Postmortem write-ups! (aka RCAs, Incident Reviews)

github.com/andyatkinson...

Coincidentally, one of the write-ups is from the Metronome team, and they're being interviewed about it on the latest episode of postgres.fm!

bsky.app/profile/samo...

😂 Needs more emojis! 🎯

Interesting. I don't have production experience with it. Did you have "bad" plans that were hard to find and "Reject" as the post mentions? Did "Accepted" plans cause unexpected problems?

How to influence query planning in Postgresql (note: it’s about Aurora’s Query Plan Management (QPM) not community Postgres)

chriskiehl.com/article/quer...

Awesome to hang out for a bit JP!

Speaking at RailsConf 2025 Quick recap of my time at the last RailsConf in Philly

Blogged! A recap of my experience giving my first conference talk at #RailsConf2025 in Philly! Thank you to @rubycentral.org and everyone I met last week! I couldn't have asked for a better first-time speaker experience than this! ❤️💎✨

www.chrisfung.dev/posts/speaki...

Frame-worthy for the office for sure! Nice artifact. Gonna miss RailsConf. Thanks for helping make the last one special! 🥺

GitHub - tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect: Persists tmux environment across system restarts. Persists tmux environment across system restarts. Contribute to tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect development by creating an account on GitHub.

After years of using tmux and losing my session, windows, panes, etc. on restart, I'd finally got around to trying out github.com/tmux-plugins.... Works great! Very straightforward to use.

prefix + Ctrl-s - save my config. Restart.

Create new tmux session.

prefix + Ctrl-r - restore

The team that writes the code needs to deploy it and be on-call for it. Full stop. Any other setup is going to lead to resentment, unfixed or slow to fix issues.

But what about SRE? You aren't Google, so don't copy what they do. They had a specific problem to solve which you don't have.