Craig Kerstiens is a product leader at Crunchy Data, specializing in managed Postgres services, distributed databases, and performance optimization. He curates Postgres Weekly, speaks at conferences, and helps enterprises scale and optimize their Postgres deployments.
164 articles from this blog
A collection of practical tips and guides for effective indexing in PostgreSQL, covering unused indexes, costs, and performance considerations.
Explains how to use PostgreSQL expression and functional indexes to optimize queries using built-in functions or custom JavaScript functions.
A developer shares common SQL bad habits like using column numbers in ORDER BY, implicit joins, and lacking comments, with examples and better practices.
A guide to selecting speakers and ensuring talk quality for technology conferences, covering methods like invite-only, coaching, and open CFPs.
A developer shares insights on designing tech conferences to foster meaningful hallway track conversations, covering break lengths, venue layout, and social activities.
A reflection on key elements that make a tech conference great, focusing on talk quality, speaker selection methods, and attendee experience.
A Heroku engineer shares his personal perspective on how the platform has operated and evolved since its acquisition by Salesforce two years prior.
A guide to using PostgreSQL's array_agg function to efficiently aggregate and format data, avoiding manual application-level processing.
A developer's perspective on how to effectively market technical products to other developers by adapting email, community engagement, and content strategies.
A developer explains his personal philosophy for blogging, focusing on knowledge sharing, becoming replaceable, and refining ideas.
Describes a prioritization and planning process used by the Heroku Postgres team to manage their technical roadmap and backlog.
Explains how to fix Django's default per-request database connection behavior to improve performance via connection pooling.
A guide to scaling database reads in Rails using replica databases and the ar-octopus gem, avoiding the complexity of full sharding.
A guide to customizing and enhancing the PostgreSQL command-line interface (psql) for improved productivity and workflow.
A developer shares his preferred method for working with PostgreSQL, advocating for the psql command-line tool and sharing key tips and configurations.
Announcing django-db-tools, a lightweight Django utility for enabling read-only or GET-only modes during large database migrations.
A guide to optimizing PostgreSQL queries using pg_stat_statements, focusing on analyzing query performance and improving indexes.
A guide to database sharding, explaining what it is, why it's needed, and how to implement logical and physical shards for scaling.
A developer shares his approach to writing clean, readable SQL with practical examples and best practices for structuring queries.
A tutorial on using PostgreSQL array fields within Django models to simplify data structures like tags, improving performance and code clarity.
