DEV Community: Annie Ghazali

Inside a PostgreSQL Checkpointer Bug: A Production Postmortem

Annie Ghazali — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:39:07 +0000

One of our client’s PostgreSQL 16.8 production databases started logging what looked like a memory error:

ERROR: invalid memory alloc request size

The error immediately pointed toward two likely suspects:

Memory exhaustion
Memory corruption

As it turned out, neither was the culprit. Instead, it had encountered a known PostgreSQL bug that trapped the checkpointer in an infinite retry loop. The only way to recover was a forced restart, followed by an extended period of WAL replay during crash recovery. In this article, @warda_bibi_ explains what happened, why manual checkpoints couldn’t fix it, and how a PostgreSQL minor version upgrade permanently resolved the issue.

PostgreSQL Wait Events: A Production Diagnostic Guide

Annie Ghazali — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:32:55 +0000

A query plan tells you what PostgreSQL intended to do. A wait event tells you what it actually did with its time. Most performance work we see in production starts one layer too high, in the EXPLAIN output, when the cheaper answer is already sitting in pg_stat_activity.
Read more: https://stormatics.tech/blogs/understanding-wait-events-in-postgresql

MCP For PostgreSQL: Automated Health Checks & Performance Analysis

Annie Ghazali — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:28:18 +0000

@warda_bibi_ has been experimenting with AI-assisted PostgreSQL troubleshooting for some time, and one project that stands out is postgres-mcp. It combines deterministic diagnostics, workload analysis, and access controls in a way that makes AI assistance practical without removing the human from the loop.

How To Run Logical Replication On A Production PostgreSQL Cluster

Annie Ghazali — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:22:23 +0000

Upgrading PostgreSQL in production is not fun. You have real data, real users, and a version of Postgres that’s probably several major releases behind. The obvious approach (dump, upgrade, restore) works fine on a 10GB database on a Saturday night. It doesn’t work when you have TBs of data, applications that can’t afford hours of downtime, and a team watching the monitoring dashboard at 2am.

File Descriptors: The OS Limit That Takes Down PostgreSQL

Annie Ghazali — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Most PostgreSQL outages that trace back to file descriptor exhaustion get misread as a database problem. The failure is one layer down: the kernel runs out of file descriptors and PostgreSQL takes the hit. This post covers how that happens under high connection counts, how to read the log sequence when it does, and how to fix it.

PostgreSQL Training: One-Day Intensive Course

Annie Ghazali — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:16:54 +0000

Expert-led, one-day training is designed to equip you with production-grade PostgreSQL skills. This intensive course delivers battle-tested strategies and insights to help you operate PostgreSQL with confidence.

PostgreSQL Training: One-Day Intensive Course

This expert-led, one-day training is designed to equip you with production-grade PostgreSQL skills. Whether you're facing challenges in database management, high availability, parameter tuning, or performance optimization, this intensive course delivers battle-tested strategies and insights to help you operate PostgreSQL with confidence.

resources.stormatics.tech

How to Cut Over After a PostgreSQL Migration

Annie Ghazali — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:51:43 +0000

Two most common cutover strategies for PostgreSQL, what each one costs you, and what each one gives you back. Read more