Phil Eaton is a staff engineer working on Postgres and software internals, sharing insights on databases, systems engineering, and life deep in the software stack.
152 articles from this blog
Overview of MySQL forks and distributions adding vector search capabilities, comparing their approaches and current support status.
Analysis of corporate contributions to the latest PostgreSQL 18 release, ranking companies by commits, code changes, and number of contributors.
Discusses how LLMs fit into a software developer's career, emphasizing the enduring importance of understanding fundamental computer science concepts.
A developer shares advice on job hunting strategies for new graduates, categorizing companies by pay, competition, and interview difficulty.
A fun exploration of psql's scripting capabilities, testing if it's Turing complete by implementing a Fibonacci sequence calculator.
A developer shares a career lesson on how an individual, through logic and persistence, can influence an organization's technical direction.
A technical deep dive into how pgcat, a Postgres connection pooler, works by multiplexing client connections to improve performance and resource usage.
A developer's advice on learning about core software systems like compilers, databases, and operating systems to become a better engineer.
A tutorial on setting up a three-node Postgres cluster using EDB's PGD CLI for high availability and logical replication in AWS.
Demonstrates a 6x speedup for analytics queries using EDB Postgres Distributed's new analytics engine compared to the standard Postgres engine.
A technical guide on setting up a single-node EDB Postgres Distributed (PGD) cluster on Ubuntu, including installation and verification steps.
An introduction to distributed systems, covering core challenges and recommended learning resources like the book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications' and the MIT course.
A guide to debugging PostgreSQL errors using the backtrace_functions GUC to generate stack traces for non-crash errors.
A developer shares how charging $100 for chats, with proceeds going to charity, unexpectedly led to more meaningful tech conversations and connections.
A technical guide on using jemalloc to detect and debug memory leaks in PostgreSQL and other C/C++/Rust projects.
A technical guide on using heaptrack to debug memory leaks in PostgreSQL, with examples of introducing and detecting leaks in C code.
A developer argues that job titles limit potential and advocates for taking initiative beyond formal roles to advance your tech career.
Explores transactions as a protocol that can be added to any storage system, not an intrinsic feature, with examples from Delta Lake, Epoxy, and Two-Phase Commit.
Explores common disk I/O failure scenarios in transactional applications and how real-world systems handle data integrity issues.
An interview with engineer Phil Eaton on the motivations, benefits, and surprising impacts of maintaining a consistent technical blog.
