The internals of PostgreSQL

A really cool paper to read is The Design of POSTGRES [1] by Stonebraker et al. It's dated by its mentions of things like POSTQUEL, but it's still really interesting to read about the early design of seminal features like the extensible ADT system, from a time when it was still innovative. 1: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M85-95.pdf

Following the link to the blog of the author I found a blog post titled “postgres cluster management system in GoCardless” http://www.interdb.jp/blog/pgsql/pg_pacemaker_01/ Which in turn lead me to https://github.com/gocardless/our-postgresql-setup And in turn to a fifteen minute talk titled “Zero-downtime Postgres upgrades” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAkNBiZzEX8 Which was interesting and informative IMO. After watching that one I was lead further via the YouTube suggested videos to a 45 minute talk titled…

Also recommend this free book: https://postgrespro.com/community/books/internals

This is fantastic. The documentation is extensive and easy to follow, but the biggest value to me are the numerous illustrations. I was superficially familiar with some of the concepts, but the illustrations are helping my truly understand them. Just look at the official documenation of the WAL, and then this book's depiction of it in chapter 9. Also, nice to see that the material is current (as of PostgreSQL 9.5).