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.
169 articles from this blog
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.
A technical guide demonstrating how to perform a minimal-downtime major version upgrade of a PostgreSQL cluster using EDB Postgres Distributed.
A developer shares their 10-year journey from web development to specializing in database engineering, focusing on Postgres and distributed systems.
A guide on improving blog post clarity by identifying and editing confusing sentences, focusing on making technical writing understandable.
