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…
Work Mem External Sort Spill
A query that sorts, DISTINCTs, or hash-aggregates a large set is far slower than the row count suggests and generates heavy temporary-file…
Query PerformanceGeneric Plan Nested Loop Explosion
A parameterized query has wildly bimodal latency: fast (sub-millisecond to low-millisecond) for almost every bind value, then suddenly catastrophic --…
Query PerformanceJsonb Query Slow Without Gin Index
A jsonb filter is functionally correct but reads far more of the table than the result size justifies, and its latency scales…
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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.