Transactions

All database engines, even Postgres, occasionally present a seemingly intractable problem that will drive everyone insane while attempting to isolate it. All it takes is the perfect storm of situational circumstances, and even a perfectly running stack of software will grind to a screeching halt. It’s situations like this that we must turn to various Postgres forensic tools to track down the issue before management starts firing people in frustration.

We’ve all had it happen. One day, we run a query or function and we wait for the result. And we wait. And we wait. Eventually, we realize something is wrong and find a DBA and yell at them. “Hey Postgres dude!” we scream. “The database is slow!” Or maybe we can’t even get a connection. Postgres just keeps saying something about too many clients. This application isn’t launching and there are ten managers breathing down our neck and we panic.