TLDR Data · DEEP DIVES

TOM LANE ON THE ARCHITECTURAL DECISIONS THAT SHAPED 30 YEARS OF POSTGRES

snowflake.com41 min read

Summary from the TLDR Data newsletter

Tom Lane, a committer for 25 of Postgres' 30 years, walks through the architectural bets that held: process-per-connection for code simplicity, write-ahead logging in 8.0 that turned it from a plaything into a serious database, and MVCC pushing maintenance work into background vacuum. He credits Berkeley's liberal license for the project surviving where its contemporaries did not, names version 13 the buggiest release, and says he would delete partitioning given the chance.