One engineer has spent 11 years mapping the internals of PostgreSQL
Hironobu Suzuki's free online guide dissects PostgreSQL's subsystems chapter by chapter, from the buffer manager and VACUUM processing to WAL, streaming replication, and a new beta chapter on logical replication. It now covers version 19-beta, has been cited in academic papers, and was published in Chinese in 2019. Suzuki writes it for his own enjoyment and charges €5,000,000 for a full commercial buyout.
I am writing for my own enjoyment. Even if you send me your article, I will never include it in my documentation.
- dang
Related:
The Internals of PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241404 - March 2025 (40 comments)
The Internals of PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30372750 - Feb 2022 (19 comments)
The Internals of PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30086374 - Jan 2022 (39 comments)
Internals of PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950460 - Jan 2019 (25 comments)
The internals of PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488315 - Jan 2017 (53 comments)
The Internals of PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142364 - July 2016 (1 comment)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
- gopalv
The latest Jepsen report on particledb triggered a new found interest in the SSI implementation in postgres.
If you are just skimming this doc, The HoT update path is the section I would jump to.
Understand HoT and then read the zHeap implementation notes (also of TOAST) puts a good mental model of what postgres does and what it doesn't do.
- jon128
Didn't find the new MVCC in there.