[{"_1":2,"_64":-5,"_65":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4,"_33":34,"_62":-5,"_63":-5},"root",{"_5":-5,"_6":-5,"_7":8,"_20":-5,"_21":22,"_23":24,"_27":28},"user","shoppingCartId","shoppingCart",{"_9":10,"_11":12,"_13":14,"_15":16,"_17":18,"_19":12},"count",0,"free",true,"updatedAt","2025-12-21T10:00:14.581Z","paymentGateway","STRIPE","cartItems",[],"loading","toast","locale","en","constants",{"_25":26},"paypalClientId","AX53Cwz8jR6rVVzzZiZNWWXl0dGagi-GZrjG-S3Ua14E5nrKMn7DxDQ730O4R8LusLPp49ALn6aRVaEy","publishers",{"_29":30,"_31":32},"companies",[],"universities",[],"routes/_store+/_readers+/email_author.$slug/route",{"_35":36,"_61":-5},"book",{"_37":38,"_39":40,"_41":42,"_43":44,"_45":46,"_47":48},"id","Z2lkOi8vbGVhbnB1Yi9TdG9yZTo6Qm9va1Byb2R1Y3QvNjg2ODI","title","Thinking in PostgreSQL","state","published","contactAuthorMethod","email","aboutText","

You already know how to keep MySQL alive in production. You’ve tuned InnoDB, chased deadlocks, and survived your fair share of late-night incident calls. Now you’ve been handed PostgreSQL—and you’d like to avoid relearning everything the hard way.

Thinking in PostgreSQL is a field guide for engineers who grew up on MySQL and now have to run Postgres in anger. It doesn’t start from “what is a database?” and it doesn’t pretend PostgreSQL is just a drop-in replacement. Instead, it focuses on the mental model shift:

From threads in one big daemon to one process per connection and mandatory connection pooling.
From InnoDB’s clustered primary key to Postgres’s heap + separate indexes and real MVCC tuples.
From “purge will sort it out” to autovacuum, freezing, and transaction age as first-class concerns.
From AUTO_INCREMENT and REPLACE INTO to sequences, identity columns, and ON CONFLICT.
From hoping the slow query log tells you something useful to EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) and pg_stat_* views.

The book is organized as a practical, production-oriented journey:

Architecture & MVCC – how Postgres actually lays out data on disk, how MVCC works, why bloat happens, and how to keep autovacuum on your side.
Concurrency & Indexing – reading pg_stat_activity, understanding isolation levels, locks, and deadlocks, and designing indexes using partial, expression, covering, GIN, BRIN, and more.
Monitoring & High Availability – using the built-in statistics views, pg_stat_statements, streaming replication, WAL, replication slots, and point-in-time recovery instead of hoping backups work.
Advanced Features & Configuration – JSONB, window functions, partitioning, extensions, key configuration knobs, and the migration “gotchas” that surprise MySQL veterans most.

Throughout, the focus is vendor-neutral and operational: short SQL snippets you can paste into psql, checklists you can run weekly, and mental models that still make sense whether your Postgres is on-prem, in the cloud, behind a proxy, or sitting next to ClickHouse and MongoDB.

If you’ve ever caught yourself treating PostgreSQL like “MySQL with slightly different syntax,” this book is your gentle intervention.

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