Guides

What you will find here

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Guides focus on principles, patterns, and playbooks.

If Labs answer “what actually happens?” with evidence,
Guides answer “why it works and how to apply it safely in production.”

Typical guides include:

• Query planning fundamentals (EXPLAIN / EXPLAIN ANALYZE)
• Index design principles and common pitfalls
• Performance tuning workflows and checklists
• Reliability patterns (HA/DR, backups, recovery)
• Cloud database operational notes (AWS RDS / Aurora)

How Guides and Labs work together

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• Guides explain concepts and decision criteria
• Labs provide reproducible proof and measurements

You will often see links like:

“See the related lab for real execution plans and timings.”

This structure keeps explanations clean while preserving hard evidence.

Topics

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PostgreSQL

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• EXPLAIN / EXPLAIN ANALYZE fundamentals (coming next)
• Index design and selectivity
• JSONB and indexing strategies
• Locking, concurrency, and transaction patterns

MySQL

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• Query execution pipeline and optimizer behavior
• Index design and EXPLAIN interpretation
• Slow query diagnostics and tuning workflow
• Replication, HA, and operational trade-offs

Cloud Databases (AWS)

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• RDS vs Aurora: decision criteria
• Backups, restore, and DR planning
• Observability and performance insights
• Cost and reliability trade-offs

Recommended starting points

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• Start with Guides to understand the concepts

• Jump into Labs to see the same ideas validated with real plans and metrics

• → Labs

• → PostgreSQL Labs

Philosophy

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• Clarity over cleverness
• Evidence over opinion
• Incremental improvements over big rewrites
• Operational reality matters

Guides are written for engineers and architects who need to reason about trade-offs, not just memorize rules.