In this episode of Dead Code, host Jared Norman talks with Andrew Atkinson, author of High Performance Postgres For Rails, about the benefits and recent updates to Postgres. Andrew shares why he prefers Postgres for its reliability, extensibility, and independence from corporate control, making it ideal for applications with complex or fluctuating data needs. They delve into Postgres 17’s new features, like JSONB functions for querying JSON as if it were relational data, improved MERGE operations for simplified upserts, and new returning clauses. Andrew’s book is designed for application developers seeking to optimize performance and security beyond ORM abstractions, with practical examples to help them harness Postgres’s full potential. Jared and Andrew agree that Postgres’s robust tools can elevate an application’s reliability, especially in high-demand scenarios like e-commerce, encouraging developers to explore its depth.

Links:

Andrew Atkinson’s Blog

Andrew’s Book, High Performance Postgres For Rails

Postgres 17 Release Notes

Scenic Gem (for managing database views in Rails)

JSON Path Syntax (for querying JSON data in Postgres)

pgvector extension for Postgres (for AI and vector search applications)

TimescaleDB Extension (for time series data)

Citus Extension (for distributed Postgres workloads)

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Episode Transcript

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