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Christophe Pettus
Personal blog · thebuild.comdataprogrammingcareer
Christophe Pettus writes the build, a personal blog at thebuild.com about data, programming and career. Since 2009, 60 different Hacker News readers have linked it 77 times, most often “PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
A technical blog by Christophe Pettus
Most-linked posts?
- PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf]6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-07-02
- Pgxbackup: Continuity Support for PgBackRest4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-05-02
- A PostgreSQL response to Uber [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-28
- The Importance of Max_wal_size3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-30
- /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-22
- PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-02
- /presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-06
- PostgreSQL When It's Not Your Job2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-04
- Securing PostgreSQL [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-03
- Don’t Assume PostgreSQL Is Slow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-30
What Hacker News says?
Further reference material: - PgSQL mailing list thread discussing Uber's post: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/579795DF.10502%40comma... - Slides from "A PostgreSQL Response to Uber", a talk that provides the PgSQL-perspective counterarguments to the Uber post: http://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf [PDF] - Previous HN discussion on the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222721…
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “PostgreSQL 10 Released”Submitted Securing PostgreSQL [pdf] as a story · 241 points
HN discussionIt's not a book, but Christophe Pettus' blog ( https://thebuild.com/blog ) has a lot of really good information. In particular, his talk "Breaking PostgreSQL at Scale" goes through the problems you run into as you hit different levels of scale ( https://thebuild.com/presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf )
Comment linking /presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf
on “Things I hate about PostgreSQL (2020)”Submitted A PostgreSQL response to Uber [pdf] as a story · 142 points
HN discussionThanks for the feedback, when initially creating the performance area there weren't a lot of great references. There's now one really great set of slides from a talk that gives you the basics of configuring your own postgresql.conf, I'll make sure to add it soon as an additional reference - http://thebuild.com/presentations/not-your-job.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/not-your-job.pdf
on “Postgres Guide”Submitted Don’t Assume PostgreSQL Is Slow as a story · 77 points
HN discussionSee slide 44 here: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2... GIN indexes are big, but Mongo's indexes are bigger than all other PostgreSQL indexes, and Mongo also requires much more space for the data.
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “Hstore development for 9.4 release”Submitted JSON vs hstore as a story · 36 points
HN discussionSee also the PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database slides (includes several benchmarks vs MongoDB): http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2...
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “Hstore development for 9.4 release”Submitted A PostgreSQL Response to Uber as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI would like to quote PostgreSQL Experts (this applies to all DBs): FULL DISK ENCRYPTION IS USELESS. [1] FDE protects against… • … theft of the media. • That’s it. • That is about 0.00000002% of the actual intrusions that you have to worry about. • Easy rule: If psql can read it in cleartext, it’s not secure. • (It’s a great idea for laptops, of course.) And then it recommends: "Always encrypt specific columns, not…
Comment linking /presentations/pgconfeu-2016-securing-postgresql.pdf
on “Equifax CEO to Congress: Not Sure We Are Encrypting Data”Submitted Sixteen Locks Ought to Be Enough for Anybody as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis should solve one of the problems Uber had with PostgreSQL reported by Christophe Pettus back in 2017[1]. 1- https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf Previous discussion from 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16526623
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “Zheap – Reinvented PostgreSQL Storage”Submitted UUID vs. BIGSERIAL for Primary Keys as a story · 13 points
HN discussionIn the case of Postgres, it has indexable json and hstore datatypes that enable the use of a table as a key-value store. And, it has good performance when compared to MongoDB: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2... So in this case, it is using Postgres as intended by the datatype designers. May be you are thinking of the Ruby Rails ORMs.
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “Reddit: Lessons Learned From Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month”Submitted PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf] as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAlso https://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “Ask HN: PostgreSQL or MySQL?”Submitted Why I Resigned as Djangocon US 2014 Program Chair as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI found this talk by Christophe Pettus [1] very informative. The title is somewhat misleading as most of the talk has little to do with Python, but it's a good introduction to more advanced Postgres concepts. Also available in PDF form [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uCxLCmzaG4 [2] http://thebuild.com/presentations/pycon-2014-pppp.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/pycon-2014-pppp.pdf
on “A list of PostgreSQL libraries, tools and resources”Submitted Django, PostgreSQL, and Transaction Management as a story · 8 points
HN discussionNot from heroku guys but definitely a worth reading http://thebuild.com/blog/2012/05/18/running-postgresql-on-aw...
Comment linking /blog/2012/05/18/running-postgresql-on-aws/
on “Postgres 9.2 – The Database You Helped Build”Submitted A PostgreSQL Replication Cheat-Sheet as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlso keep this in mind: http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/03/10/you-cannot-recover-from-...
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/10/you-cannot-recover-from-the-loss-of-a-tablespace/
on “How to Corrupt an SQLite Database File”Submitted PostgreSQL the PCI Compliant Database [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere was a bug related to replication; it was caught and fixed rather quickly at the time, but Uber still got bitten by it. See http://thebuild.com/presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
Comment linking /presentations/uber-perconalive-2017.pdf
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL (2016)”Submitted PostgreSQL When It's Not Your Job as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLook at performance numbers: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2... Furthermore, consider that PG is pretty much an amazing RDBMS in addition to having a good document story.
Comment linking /presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
on “How to Migrate 50M Records from Mongo to PostgreSQL in Less Than a Day”Submitted Unbreaking your Django Application as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPostgreSQL also has JSON support. You might want to check out Christphe Pettus's presentation on this subject: http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/07/02/postgresql-as-a-nosql-da...
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/02/postgresql-as-a-nosql-database/
on “Schema-less is usually a lie”Submitted 10 Easy Ways to Destroy Performance as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
