🔗 What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres

I have been working professionally for the better part of a decade on web apps and, in that time, I have had to learn how to use a lot of different systems and tools. During that education, I found that the official documentation typically proved to be the most helpful.

Except for Postgres. It is not because the official docs are not stellar (they are!)–they are just massive. For the current version (17 at the time of writing), if printed as a standard PDF on US letter-sized paper, it’s 3,200 pages long[^1]. It is not something any junior engineer can just sit down and read start to finish.

So I want to try to catalog the bits that I wish someone had just told me before working with a Postgres database. Hopefully, this makes things easier for the next person going on a journey similar to mine.

Note that many of these things may also apply to other SQL database management systems (DBMSs) or other databases more generally, but I am not as familiar with others so I am not sure what does and does not apply.

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