Paths

Guided PostgreSQL journeys

Follow a path: a curated sequence of hands-on courses and real incident simulations that build one skill end to end.

Each path blends hands-on courses with real incident simulations — follow it end to end, or cherry-pick what you need.

backend, anyone new to Postgres · Beginner

PostgreSQL Foundations

Get comfortable with the client and basic investigation before going deep.

3 courses · 2 simulations
backend, SRE · Intermediate

Reading Query Plans

Read EXPLAIN, find the slow query, and understand why the planner chose a plan.

3 courses · 7 simulations
backend, DBA · Intermediate

Indexing Mastery

Pick the right index for the access pattern — B-tree, composite, partial, covering, GIN, trigram.

3 courses · 7 simulations
backend, SRE · Intermediate

Locks & Concurrency

Transactions, isolation, lock contention and deadlocks under real concurrency.

2 courses · 10 simulations
backend, platform, SRE · Intermediate

Connection Pool Mastery

Why connections are expensive, pgbouncer modes, sizing, and the storms that exhaust a pool.

2 courses · 10 simulations
DBA, SRE · Advanced

Vacuum, Bloat & Wraparound

MVCC, dead tuples, autovacuum tuning, bloat and the xid-wraparound emergency.

2 courses · 11 simulations
SRE, DBA · Advanced

Replication & WAL

Streaming replication, WAL, replication slots, lag and conflicts.

2 courses · 10 simulations
SRE, DBA · Advanced

Backup & Recovery Drills

Logical and physical backups, WAL archiving, PITR and restore drills under pressure.

2 courses · 10 simulations
SRE · Advanced

HA & Failover On-Call

Detect a crash, promote a replica, avoid split-brain, validate after failover.

1 course · 10 simulations
backend, platform · Advanced

Safe Schema Migrations

Lock-safe DDL, CONCURRENTLY, expand/contract and zero-downtime rollouts.

2 courses · 12 simulations
DBA, platform, security · Advanced

Security & Access Control

pg_hba, roles and privileges, default privileges, RLS, search_path and SSL.

1 course · 10 simulations
platform, DBA · Advanced

Multi-Tenant Operations

Many databases on one cluster: wrong-database mistakes, per-db limits and schema drift.

1 course · 9 simulations
SRE, DBA · Intermediate

Storage Pressure

Disk fills from temp files, WAL, archives, tablespaces and logs — and how to recover.

1 course · 6 simulations
backend, SRE · Intermediate

Diagnose a Slow Endpoint

A task-focused journey: from a slow endpoint to the root cause and fix.

3 courses · 4 simulations
SRE, on-call · Intermediate

Live Diagnostics & Observability

See who is doing what, find the heavy queries, spot blocking and unmonitored lag.

2 courses · 4 simulations
backend, DBA · Advanced

Planner & MVCC Internals

How the planner estimates and chooses, and how MVCC shapes visibility and bloat.

2 courses · 3 simulations
backend · Intermediate

Backend Engineer Path

What a backend engineer needs to ship and operate a service on Postgres.

5 courses · 5 simulations
SRE, on-call · Advanced

SRE On-Call Path

Operate Postgres under fire: diagnose, mitigate, fail over and recover.

4 courses · 13 simulations
DBA · Advanced

DBA Path

Own the cluster: maintenance, replication, backup/recovery, security and capacity.

5 courses · 19 simulations
backend, platform · Advanced

Production Readiness

Make a Postgres-backed service survive load, deploys and migrations.

4 courses · 4 simulations
platform, backend · Advanced

Zero-Downtime Operations

Ship schema and infra changes without taking the app down.

2 courses · 4 simulations
candidates, backend · Intermediate

PostgreSQL Interview Prep

The core topics interviewers probe: plans, indexes, transactions, MVCC and locks.

4 courses · 4 simulations
SRE, on-call, leads · Advanced

Incident Response Readiness

Compound, multi-cause incidents — the way production actually breaks.

2 courses · 10 simulations
SRE, leads · Expert

Capstone: Incident Control

Final timed production incidents that demand the whole toolkit.

2 courses · 5 simulations