Learning Pathways

Understand PostgreSQL the way it actually works

Five guided pathways that take you from "it runs" to "I know exactly why." Every lesson explains what happens, where in the source it happens, why, and how to act on it — the depth you expect from a senior DBA who has debugged this in production, grounded in PostgreSQL internals.

Source-grounded explanations Concrete, runnable examples Foundations → advanced internals

What & Why

Not just commands — the mechanism. Why a query chooses a seq scan, why a checkpoint stalls writes.

Where

Pointers into the PostgreSQL source so you can verify and go deeper than any blog post.

How to fix

Diagnostics, recovery steps, and prevention you can paste into a real incident.

01 — Foundations: PostgreSQL Internals 101

From the page cache and MVCC to how a row is physically stored on disk.

8 lessons

02 — Performance: Query & Index Mastery

Planner internals, statistics, and how ANALYZE shapes every query plan.

12 lessons

03 — Operations: Zero-Downtime Deployments

WAL, checkpoints, vacuum, replication — the machinery that keeps a cluster alive.

7 lessons

04 — Advanced: Replication & HA Architecture

Lock managers, the buffer manager, and the source paths senior DBAs reason about.

14 lessons

05 — The Engine Room: How PostgreSQL Actually Executes

Executor stages, expression evaluation, and the source paths that turn a plan into a result set.

12 lessons
Free

Start with 5 lessons free

The first lessons of the Foundations pathway are free and complete — no card required. See exactly how deep it goes before you decide.

Pro

Unlock all five pathways

Every lesson across Foundations, Performance, Operations, Advanced, and The Engine Room — plus all cookbook recipes and diagnostic playbooks.

See plans