Topic · 2 posts
Databases
Most performance bugs live in the database. Notes on EXPLAIN output you can defend, indexes that earn their disk, replication topologies that survive failover, and when to stop scaling vertically.
The database is usually the slowest thing in the request path, the most expensive thing to get wrong in a migration, and the most load-bearing thing in the incident blameless post-mortem. Everything under this hub comes from the boring side of that - query plans, indexes, locks, and the operational reality of Postgres at scale.
§ Writing
All writing on databases
- May 2025 MUMPS is not a joke, and it runs your pharmacy MUMPS runs Epic, VistA, and chunks of global healthcare. It turns 60. Every time I mention it in a meeting someone laughs - then finds out I'm serious.
- Aug 2024 I wrote MUMPS in VistA's Pharmacy package What it actually felt like to write production MUMPS routines inside VistA - Pharmacy, Billing, HL7 - on GT.M in Linux. Not a joke. I was there.
§ Related