The PostgreSQL Cookbook
Full-incident runbooks for the failures single error pages can't cover — replication lag, autovacuum bloat, lock storms, failovers. Each one a complete diagnose → fix → verify playbook.
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PostgreSQL Crash Due to OOM Kill
⚠️ Symptoms All active connections drop simultaneously with no individual query error — clients see disconnect errors (connection reset, FATAL:…
Advisory Lock Leakage — Dangling Locks
⚠️ Symptoms One or more application threads hang at the point where they call pg_advisory_lock — not on a database…
Unused Indexes Consuming Space
Disk usage on a table is far larger than the data warrants; write throughput is lower than expected on a…
Advisory Lock Leakage — Dangling Locks
⚠️ Symptoms One or more application threads hang at the point where they call pg_advisory_lock — not on a database query, but…
Locking & ConcurrencyDiagnosing A Blocked Query Queue
A group of identical or related queries all hang at once; pg_stat_activity shows several backends with wait_event_type = 'Lock' and state =…
Locking & ConcurrencySerialization Failure Error Could Not Serialize
Transactions under SERIALIZABLE isolation intermittently fail with 'ERROR: could not serialize access ...'; the failure appears only under concurrency and…
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- ✓ The full verification step for every recipe — executed, not described.
- ✓ Catalog & log queries that surface every at-risk object up front.
- ✓ Cross-version gotchas across PostgreSQL 14–18.
- ✓ Exactly where each symptom surfaces on managed Postgres.