Recent posts tagged postgresql

A deployment can roll back cleanly while the database stays incompatible with the old application. Before shipping a schema change, check whether the previous release can still read and write the data that the new release creates. Consider a fiction...

While testing a reconnect system for a deliverer-facing WebSocket gateway: when someone reconnects after losing their connection, they should get a snapshot of their current job plus any events they missed while offline. Two pieces, both of which I w...

I was fixing a real bug in a delivery backend I'm building: a customer's order could get created in Postgres even when something downstream failed, leaving an order with no event history behind it. The fix looked simple. Wrap the whole thing in pris...

Modern web applications are no longer built with a single technology. A production application usually involves multiple layers working together: a frontend that users interact with, a backend that processes requests, APIs that connect different comp...

While working on Waitless, I needed customers to be able to track their position in a queue and leave the queue without creating an account. That led to a small but interesting security design question: > How can I authorize an anonymous user witho...

While working on Waitless, a real-time queue management platform, I came across a backend problem that looked simple at first: > A customer reaches the front of the queue, and the system needs to send notifications to other customers. The first ins...

Building a modern full stack application is about much more than creating attractive user interfaces. A successful application needs a reliable frontend, a powerful backend, secure authentication, efficient database management, and a smooth user expe...

Your team just signed up for a dedicated vector database costing $300 per month to index 50,000 customer support documents. The dashboard looks sleek, the documentation promises scalability to billions of vectors, and the product team celebrates that...

In earlier installments, we engineered the foundational backbone of LifeOps: in Part 1https://datalaria.com/en/posts/app-lifeopspart1arquitecturabackend/ we designed the polymorphic PostgreSQL schema and modular FastAPI backend, and in Part 2https://...

How many apps do you use daily to manage your life? If you are anything like me, you probably have one app to track your runs and gym workouts, another to keep tabs on books, a website to rate movies and TV series, and two or three more tools for pro...

> TL;DR. My uptime monitor keeps config and incidents in Postgres and check results in ClickHouse. The split is one rule: does a row ever change? Config gets edited, so it wants Postgres transactions and constraints. A check result is written once an...

I built two systems that both needed event tracking. I used PostgreSQL in one and MongoDB in the other. Here's exactly why — and what I learned from doing both. Although the two systems were completely different in purpose, they shared one architectu...

Flat JSON is easy. Nested JSON is where the day goes: an API response with orders inside customers inside accounts, a jsonb column three levels deep, a config file that grew a tree. Three tasks come up over and over, and each one has a trick that mak...

A critique of the trend toward account-required database GUI clients, arguing that tools holding production credentials should never route data through vendor backends. The post makes the case for local-first design using Tabularis as a concrete exam...

A couple of years ago I was hired as the solo backend engineer to build the production backend for an AI product company from scratch. No legacy code, no existing schema, no team to defer to — just a frontend team waiting on an API and a product team...

1. The Flat Table Trap Excel is Dead Managing an industrial Bill of Materials BOM through spreadsheets is a structural deficiency. Excel provides a two-dimensional environment for a three-dimensional problem. Hardware engineering and manufacturing ...

If your web application is slow, the database is almost certainly the bottleneck. Not the frontend framework. Not the web server. Not the network. The database. I have spent nine years building backend systems across seven companies, and in every si...

Do you remember the classic Snake from the old Nokias? Now imagine it with neon lights, synthesized music, explosive particles, and most importantly: connected to the cloud. Web game development has experienced a renaissance thanks to the power of H...

Databases are the backbone of modern applications. Whether you're building APIs, SaaS platforms, or enterprise systems, choosing the right database and using it correctly can make a huge difference in performance and scalability. One of the most rel...