#devops
Oct 25, 2021

By Showmaxers, for Showmaxers: PostgreSQL Terminology

Showmax Engineer
Showmax Engineer
postgresqltalksshowmax
By Showmaxers, for Showmaxers: PostgreSQL Terminology

Here at Showmax, we enjoy the luxury of being surrounded by highly-experienced colleagues. Somebody somewhere at Showmax can both understand and work with the thing that no one else can — all the time. Maybe it sounds a bit like bragging, but the truth is that Showmax is full of great people who are willing to share their knowledge.

In the “Sharing is caring” spirit, we came up with a series of internal talks called, By Showmaxers, for Showmaxers, and we recently started making them public. There are already talks about Networks, and Android app building, available.

For us, sharing the talks is a fantastic way to look into somebody else’s mind, understand how they think, and see how they solve problems. And, it’s a great way to share and discuss knowledge across Showmax and beyond.

Our latest talk focuses on PostgreSQL Terminology, and is led by Angus Dippenaar. He worked on Showmax projects from South Africa, and moved to work with us in Prague, Czech Republic. Angus was recently introduced in the interview investigating the state of DevOps at Showmax.

The talk was meant to fill some holes in our knowledge of PostgreSQL. So, it guides you through the basic PostgreSQL terminology you need to understand when reading the official documentation and blogs.

You may learn what all these PostgreSQL terms mean

Command, query, local or global object, non-schema local objects, relation, tablespace, database, database cluster, instance and its processes like postmaster or backend; session, connection, heap, file segment, table, TOAST, tuple, view, materialized (view), transaction, commit, rollback, index, write-ahead log, WAL record, WAL file, checkpoint, Multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), dead tuples (dead rows), or transaction exhaustion.

PostgreSQL Terminology from Showmax Engineering

Here’s some slides

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The terminology is followed by a demonstration of transaction exhaustion

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The tuple freezing demo

Check out the demo here
Code for the demo on GitHub

You can watch a recording of the talk on YouTube

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