PostgreSQL Administration — Expert Tier

Who I Am and What Expert Responsibility Means

Lesson notes coming soon.

Michael Patrick McCoy

I’ve spent over 20 years optimizing databases and designing rock-solid data systems. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learned to help others build faster, smarter, and more reliable platforms.

PostgreSQL Administration — Expert Tier

Module 0 — Expert Mindset & Responsibility
  • Who I Am and What Expert Responsibility Means
  • What “Expert” Actually Means
  • Thinking in Failure Modes
Module 1 — WAL, Checkpoints & Crash Recovery (Deep Internals)
  • WAL Record Internals
  • Checkpoint Mechanics
  • Crash Recovery Flow
  • Durability vs Performance Trade-offs
Module 2 — MVCC, Concurrency & Locking (No Fear Level)
  • MVCC Internals
  • Lock Types & Lock Levels
  • Deadlocks & Detection
  • Transaction Isolation Levels
Module 3 — Query Planner Pathologies & Control
  • Cost Model Limitations
  • Join Order Explosions
  • Parameter Sensitivity & Plan Instability
  • Plan Stability Strategies
Module 4 — Scaling PostgreSQL Beyond One Box
  • Vertical Scaling Limits
  • Table Partitioning Trade-offs
  • Logical Replication
  • Sharding PostgreSQL (Last Resort)
Module 5 — High Availability & Failover (Reality-Based)
  • Failure Scenarios in HA Systems
  • Failover Mechanics
  • Replica Lag & Consistency
  • Testing Failover Safely
Module 6 — Advanced Maintenance & Zero-Downtime Work
  • VACUUM FREEZE at Scale
  • Reindexing Without Downtime
  • Table Rewrites & Schema Changes
  • Long-Term Data Hygiene
Module 7 — Security, Auditing & Compliance
  • Row-Level Security (RLS)
  • Auditing & Logging
  • Encryption & Data Protection
  • Least Privilege at Scale
Module 8 — PostgreSQL in the Real World
  • Managed PostgreSQL Trade-offs
  • Observability & Monitoring Stacks
  • Incident Response & Postmortems
  • When PostgreSQL Isn’t the Right Tool
Module 9 — Expert Failure Scenarios
  • Wraparound Emergency
  • WAL Explosion & Disk Meltdown
  • Planner Regression in Production
  • Multi-Failure Incidents
Module 10 — Expert Capstone
  • Design a Production-Grade Architecture
  • Diagnose a Severe Performance Incident
  • Execute Zero-Downtime Maintenance
  • From Expert to Authority