About PGCare
PostgreSQL reliability knowledge sharing about best practices.
The Mission
PGCare exists to help, make PostgreSQL databases boring. Not boring in a bad way—boring in the best possible way. Boring means reliable. Boring means predictable. Boring means you can focus on building your product instead of worrying about your database.
The Experience
My work with PostgreSQL has been grounded in real production environments, where databases are expected to be available, predictable, and recoverable under pressure.
I’ve supported systems at different stages of maturity — from fast-growing platforms dealing with scaling pains, to established environments where stability, controlled change, and data safety matter more than rapid iteration. The common thread across all of them is the need for calm, well-understood database operations.
My experience spans day-to-day administration as well as less frequent but higher-risk activities such as upgrades, replication changes, backup validation, and recovery planning. These are areas where small assumptions often lead to large outages if they are not handled carefully.
Over time, this work has shaped a practical approach: keep systems simple, verify critical paths regularly, document what actually works, and avoid unnecessary complexity that becomes fragile during incidents.
My focus areas include:
- Backup and disaster recovery strategies
- Database monitoring and alerting systems
- Performance optimization and query tuning
- High availability and replication
- Near Zero-downtime migrations and upgrades
- Production incident response and troubleshooting
The Philosophy
Reliability is built through proof, not assumptions. Systems are only dependable when their most critical paths are exercised regularly and behave in predictable ways.
In PostgreSQL environments, this means more than having monitoring, backups, or high availability configured. It means restoring backups, validating replication, rehearsing failovers, and keeping operational steps clear enough to follow under pressure.
The goal is not perfection or complexity. The goal is calm systems that fail in expected ways, recover quickly, and do not surprise the people responsible for them.
I believe in:
- Practical over theoretical: Real-world solutions that work in production
- Testing over assumptions: Validate everything, especially disaster recovery
- Simplicity over complexity: The best solution is often the simplest one
- Documentation over tribal knowledge: Your team should know what to do
- Prevention over firefighting: Catch issues before they become incidents
This Blog
This site is a collection of practical notes, lessons learned, and insights from working with PostgreSQL in production for over a decade. The posts focus on real-world challenges and proven solutions—no fluff, no theory for theory's sake.
Topics include backup strategies, monitoring best practices, performance optimization, disaster recovery, and the operational aspects of running PostgreSQL that don't always make it into the official documentation.