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Christophe Pettus
thebuild.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Christophe Pettus, a PostgreSQL consultant, writes about running, securing, backing up, and tuning PostgreSQL.
What HN saysHN links his talks and posts on PostgreSQL as a document store, running on AWS, and full disk encryption; pgxbackup is also mentioned.
53HN people shared it
17linked it in comments
50stories submitted
636story points
4 months agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database (2013) [pdf]6 people · 15 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 2A PostgreSQL response to Uber [pdf]5 people · 142 points · first shared 2017 · 82 comments on HN
- 3Pgxbackup: Continuity Support for PgBackRest4 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 4The Importance of Max_wal_size3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Securing PostgreSQL [pdf]2 people · 241 points · first shared 2016 · 71 comments on HN
- 6Don’t Assume PostgreSQL Is Slow2 people · 78 points · first shared 2015 · 31 comments on HN
- 7A PostgreSQL Replication Cheat-Sheet2 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 8PostgreSQL When It's Not Your Job2 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 9PostgreSQL as a Schemaless Database2 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 102019 fosdem broken.pdf2 people · first shared 2021
- 11JSON vs hstore1 people · 36 points · first shared 2013 · 14 comments on HN
- 12A PostgreSQL Response to Uber1 people · 34 points · first shared 2017 · 5 comments on HN
- 13UUID vs. BIGSERIAL for Primary Keys1 people · 13 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Why I Resigned as Djangocon US 2014 Program Chair1 people · 10 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 15Django, PostgreSQL, and Transaction Management1 people · 8 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jve · 2017-11-11
I 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 entire
database or disk"
However encrypt your backups.
I think it is fairly sensible.
[1] Securing PostgreSQL [PDF], Page 31 : http://thebuild.com/presentations/pgconfeu-2016-securing-postgresql.pd…
craigkerstiens · 2015-08-03
Thanks 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
angersock · 2014-09-24
Look at performance numbers:
http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
Furthermore, consider that PG is pretty much an amazing RDBMS in addition to having a good document story.
sickpig · 2012-12-06
Not from heroku guys but definitely a worth reading http://thebuild.com/blog/2012/05/18/running-postgresql-on-aws/
hans_castorp · 2026-05-02
A side note on pgBackRest: PGX created a fork and announced to maintain it under the name pgxbackup:
https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/05/01/pgxbackup-continuity-support-for-…
ameliaquining · 2026-04-29
This post comes uncomfortably close to plagiarizing https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/04/23/preempt_none-is-dead-your-postgre… which it cites as a source; almost all the technical explanation is in there and some of the wording is extremely similar. Compare, e.g., "What Linux 7.0 actually changed" in Pettus's post to "What Is Preemption?" in this one. I think this link should have been to Pettus's post instead.
drewda · 2023-11-28
For an interesting presentation on Postgres at different orders of magnitude, all the way up to petabytes, see https://thebuild.com/presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf
eor · 2021-04-06
It'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)
yayzheap · 2020-10-12
This 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
GrayShade · 2018-06-11
There 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
cookiecaper · 2017-10-05
Further reference material:
- PgSQL mailing list thread discussing Uber's post: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/579795DF.10502%40commandprompt.c…
- 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
- Slides from "Migrating Uber from MySQL to Postgres" (2013), in which Uber's prior migration _to_ PgSQL is discussed: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/53683323/migrating-uber-from-my…
rMBP · 2016-02-15
I 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
integraton · 2013-11-07
See slide 44 here: http://thebuild.com/presentations/pg-as-nosql-pgday-fosdem-2013.pdf
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.
lobsterdiner · 2013-10-06
Also keep this in mind: http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/03/10/you-cannot-recover-from-the-loss-o…
Shorel · 2013-08-26
In 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-2013.pdf
So in this case, it is using Postgres as intended by the datatype designers.
May be you are thinking of the Ruby Rails ORMs.
antsaasma · 2013-07-04
PostgreSQL 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-database/