Postgres internals—MVCC, WAL, and replication—are the hidden levers that decide whether your OLTP stays fast and your OLAP stays smooth. The thread around “Postgres Internals Hiding in Plain Sight” puts these pieces front and center, showing how visibility, checkpoints, and writes land in real-world latency and throughput [1].
MVCC in Practice — MVCC lets readers jump past blocking writes and keeps long transactions honest. That visibility work, plus vacuum and commit timing, shapes both hot-spot OLTP patterns and analytical scans that don’t block users [1].
WAL & Durability — In edge-to-edge discussions, WAL isn’t just recovery: it’s the live heartbeat of the system. Real-world practice treats every write as immediately durable, queryable, and replicable, without needing separate streaming pipes [3].
Real-World Architectures — A big debate centers on shared-nothing (serverless) versus shared-everything (bare metal). Serverless introduces components like the safekeeper for WAL and the page server for heap, plus cold storage (S3) to bridge compute and persistence, trading latency for elasticity. Bare metal bundles storage and compute, squeezing microsecond disk access for tight, predictable tails [2].
UnisonDB in Action — The open‑source, log-native approach riffs on the WAL-at-the-core idea: - WAL-based replication with sub-second fan-out to 100+ edge replicas [3] - Multi-Modal Storage: Key-Value, Wide-Column, and Large Objects [3] - Edge-First Design: optimized for real-time, local-first workloads [3] - Namespace Isolation for multi-tenancy [3]
Closing thought: internals matter—watch how MVCC, WAL, and replication choices steer the next-gen PostgreSQL deployments in distributed and edge contexts [1][3].
References
Postgres Internals Hiding in Plain Sight
Explores hidden Postgres internals and practical implications for performance and usage.
View sourceDebating Modern Postgres Architectures: Shared Nothing vs. Shared Everything
Compares serverless shared-nothing vs shared-everything Postgres architectures; analyzes latency, scalability, and future paths in NVMe, for OLTP/OLAP.
View sourceShow HN: Unisondb A open source streaming multimodal database for Edge Computing
Open-source log-native database unifying persistence and streaming; WAL-based replication, multi-modal storage, edge-first design, multi-tenant isolation for real-time edge workloads everywhere.
View source