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This book is for backend engineers who already ship systems people depend on — who can write SQL, know what an index is for, and have watched production surprise them anyway.

It is not a tutorial from an expert looking back. It is written alongside the learning: one mechanism at a time, rewritten carefully enough to be a lasting reference. Documentation tells you what a parameter does. This book tries to tell you what is happening underneath such that the parameter needs to exist at all.

The current edition covers PostgreSQL storage and memory (heap pages, TOAST, visibility and free-space maps, the buffer pool, WAL, full-page writes) and indexing (B-trees, leaf splits, HOT updates, index-only scans, covering indexes, and hash indexes). More chapters will follow as the study continues.

If something here is wrong or incomplete, that is expected of a living draft. Correct it, and keep going. That is the point.

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Kick off your book project, get started with GhostAI, get better at marketing, or spend the day doing all three! Free live workshops on Zoom. Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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