How Index Bloat Silently Slows Down Postgres Queries
Postgres indexes do not shrink automatically. Bloat compounds quietly until every read pays for it. Here is how to spot it and fix it with REINDEX CONCURRENTLY.
Guide
3 min read
From the control plane
Guides, case studies, and research on letting AI agents act on production data, safely, inside your guardrails.
How to Write a Production Database Access Policy for AI Agents
The six clauses a production database access policy needs once AI agents hold credentials, plus a copy-paste, tool-agnostic policy template you can adapt today.
Tutorial
7 min read
How to Build a Context Layer for Your Postgres Database
A runbook for giving AI agents real schema context: introspect the Postgres catalogs, harvest COMMENT metadata, map foreign keys, and assemble one context document.
Tutorial
9 min read
The Source-to-Target Mapping Document
Why source-to-target mapping documents break mid-migration, and a row structure plus review rituals that keep the mapping alive until go-live.
Guide
9 min read
ERP Migration: Reverse-Engineer the Source Schema
A working method to reverse engineer an undocumented database schema: inventory tables, recover missing relationships, decode columns, validate the map.
Guide
10 min read
Three Revenue Columns, One Source of Truth
How to find the source of truth when a database has duplicate columns like amount, total_amount, and revenue_net: trace writes, trace reads, reconcile.
Guide
9 min read
What Is an AI Database Reliability Engineer?
An AI database reliability engineer watches production databases, diagnoses issues, and proposes fixes under human review. The role and the stack.
Guide
10 min read
ERP Data Migration: Mapping Legacy Databases Faster
Legacy data mapping is where ERP projects slip after go-live. How semantic discovery plus expert-validated mappings turns weeks of analysis into days.
Guide
8 min read
AWS Performance Insights migration guide
AWS retires the Performance Insights console on July 31, 2026. What changes, what moves behind Advanced mode, and how to tier your RDS and Aurora fleet.
Guide
9 min read
Agentjacking: why agent security gateways matter
Agentjacking proves coding agents can be hijacked via MCP in 85% of attempts. Here is what it means for agent security gateway design in 2026.
News
7 min read
What Is an Agent Context Layer? A 2026 Guide
The agent context layer gives AI agents persistent memory beyond the prompt window. The five architecture patterns and what enterprise deployments need.
Guide
5 min read
AutoJack: why AI agents need a security gateway
One webpage, zero credentials, host-level RCE: AutoJack shows exactly why AI agents need a dedicated security gateway before production.
Guide
5 min read
AI agent security gateways: now table stakes
AutoJack RCE, WitnessAI GA, and Databricks DAIS 2026: three signals in one week that made AI agent security gateways non-negotiable.
Essay
8 min read
AI Agent Memory Layer: Episodic, Semantic, Relational (2026)
What is an AI agent memory layer? A 2026 guide to episodic, semantic, and relational memory: schemas, retrieval patterns, and what survives a restart.
Guide
9 min read
Safe AI agent access to production databases
A layered, database-agnostic approach to AI agent production access: static grants plus a runtime control plane that gates and records every action.
Guide
8 min read
Replit AI deletion: what a control plane stops
A factual breakdown of the July 2025 Replit AI database deletion and the control-plane checks that would have stopped each failure.
Analysis
8 min read
Read-only isn't enough: guardrails for AI agents
Read-only access feels safe but blocks the fixes you actually need. Here is why mediated writes in the data path beat instruction-based guardrails.
Guide
7 min read
Human-in-the-loop database migrations for agents
Most human-in-the-loop advice stops at approve database changes. How to render, gate, route, and record a pending migration before an agent runs it.
Guide
7 min read
AI audit trails: what an immutable agent ledger must capture
AI audit trail requirements for agents on databases: why API call logs cannot reconstruct what changed, and what a tamper-evident action ledger records instead.
Guide
7 min read
Railway's two migration outages, one CI check
Railway had two Postgres migration outages in six weeks. Same cascade, different trigger. A close reading of both post-mortems and the one pre- merge check.
Postmortem
10 min read
Time-series anomaly detection fails on Postgres
Yahoo S5, NAB, and UCR shaped the TSAD literature. Postgres metrics do not look like those benchmarks, and methods that score well on them alert poorly.
Pattern
11 min read
Self-driving databases in 2026: progress vs hype
The 2017 self-driving DBMS vision promised autonomous tuning, indexing, and healing. What actually shipped by 2026, and where a human still signs off.
Essay
13 min read
The robust automated fix problem at PR time
Eraser (VLDB 2024) named it, RIB extended it. The robust-fix problem is one question asked at every layer of the DB stack. Datapace asks it at PR time.
Essay
12 min read
Repo agent vs dashboard copilot for the LLM DBA
D-Bot, λ-Tune, and ROMAS are dashboard copilots. For regressions caused by a merged commit, that is the wrong surface. The case for a repo-native LLM DBA.
Essay
11 min read
PR-time simulation vs lock_timeout: use both
lock_timeout is correct and necessary, but not enough. A PR-time lock-graph simulator catches the same class of migration before the merge.
Pattern
11 min read
The 8,400x staging gap in migration safety
An April 2026 post-mortem tested a CHECK constraint on 10,000 rows, then hit 84 million in production. Four hours locked. The failure mode: sampling bias.
Pattern
11 min read
Why does ALTER TABLE block SELECT in Postgres?
A SELECT issued during an ALTER TABLE waits even when locks are compatible. Why Postgres queues reads behind DDL, with pg_locks proof and the fixes.
Pattern
12 min read
auto_explain vs pg_stat_statements in production
The two Postgres diagnostic extensions are complementary, not competitors. When each lies, how to join them via queryid, and the minimum production setup.
Reference
12 min read
Online DDL: pgroll vs pg-osc vs pg_karnak vs gh-ost
Four online DDL tools, four architectures: versioned views, shadow tables, 2PC, and binlog streaming. A neutral comparison with failure modes named.
Comparison
13 min read
The DBA extinction: what actually disappeared
Between 2015 and 2025 the DBA role dissolved at mid-size SaaS. Three of four responsibility buckets found new owners. PR-time schema review did not.
Essay
11 min read
Attribution gap: DB research can't name commits
DBSherlock, iSQUAD, D-Bot, and RCRank each infer a DB-internal root cause. None names the commit. The gap between inference and the developer workflow.
Essay
13 min read
Why AI-written migrations break production
AI coding agents write a real share of migrations and break databases in ways tests and CI never catch. Here is the check that stops it before merge.
Essay
12 min read
What Supabase monitoring does not tell you
Supabase ships solid default monitoring. Past a point, three gaps appear: no historical context, a reactive top-queries view, no link to user impact.
Best Practices
8 min read
The 5 most common Postgres SQL mistakes
Most Postgres performance problems come from a short list of avoidable SQL patterns: unindexed filters, SELECT *, deep OFFSET, N+1, and casts in WHERE.
Best Practices
9 min read
The N+1 cascade EXPLAIN ANALYZE cannot see
EXPLAIN ANALYZE plans one query at a time. N+1 storms are a hundred fast queries adding up to a slow page. The signal lives in pg_stat_statements.
Pattern
8 min read
One sequential scan can double your Supabase bill
A sequential scan on a hot table is both a performance problem and a cost problem. The fix for both is the same index, caught at PR time.
Pattern
7 min read
pg_stat_statements: find the queries that hurt
pg_stat_statements is the only unbiased view of where Postgres spends time. Setup, the two queries that cover most use, and how to read the output.
Tutorial
9 min read
Reading Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE BUFFERS
Postgres has three levels of EXPLAIN: the plan, the actual execution, and the real I/O cost. Most developers learn the first and miss the other two.
Tutorial
10 min read
Ready to let agents touch production, safely?
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