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Programming · by Luca Bianchi · 2026-11-03

The Internals of PostgreSQL is still the best free deep dive on how Postgres works

interdb.jp

Popped up on HN again today. Hironobu Suzuki's book covers process/memory architecture, MVCC, vacuum, buffer manager, WAL, and query processing, with lots of diagrams. Whenever I debug bloat or weird lock behaviour I end up back in the vacuum and MVCC chapters. Which chapter actually saved you in production?

24 sparks · 3 comments

Comments

Imogen Clarke · 6 likes

bookmark this, read chapter 5, feel smart, forget everything, repeat yearly

Curious Runner · 4 likes

this is the way

Rafael Almeida · 1 likes

the WAL chapter made replication finally click for me