What is High Availability to Postgres? I’ve staked my career on the answer to that question since I first presented an HA stack to Postgres Open in 2012, and I still don’t feel like there’s an acceptable answer. No matter how the HA techniques have advanced since then, there’s always been a nagging suspicion in my mind that something is missing. But I’m here to say that a bit of research has uncovered an approach that many different Postgres cloud vendors appear to be converging upon.

When it comes to reordering the items in a list, databases have long had a kind of Faustian Bargain to accomplish the task. Nobody really liked any of the more common solutions, least of all the poor database tasked with serving up the inevitable resulting hack.

Postgres is no different in this regard. Consider a list_item table like this, demonstrating five items in a to-do list:

Potential layoffs are a persistent fixture in some industries, like some kind of Sword of Damocles looming over them in perpetuity. With the recent advances in AI and the weak economy battering industries of all description, the rate is only accelerating. Perhaps anecdotally, Tech is one of the worst affected in the current climate, with nearly 50k laid off already in 2024 alone, and over 250k in 2023 according to the Layoff Tracker.

I’ve had something of a “busy” week thus far. My sleep has suffered unfortunately thanks to it, but it’ll settle down eventually. See, when I get an idea in my head, it essentially consumes me. I go to bed yearning to work on it, and if I wake up at night to use the restroom, it’s all I can do to go back to sleep. Sometimes, I simply can’t. It was that kind of week, when my urge to tinker absolutely devours my faculties.

Well, I’ve finally reformatted my Dell R730 project system and replaced TrueNAS SCALE with Proxmox VE once again. Now that I want to go deeper into virtualizing so I can do more Kubernetes experimentation, using a NAS device as the Hypervisor only serves to complicate the process. There wasn’t anything critical on the system, so that made it convenient to reformat, and just start from scratch. Why all the re-shuffling? EDB wants me to start digging into our cloud products, and that means I need a more convenient place to stage and experiment with that kind of thing.