A Postgres survival guide catalogs the failure modes that break scaling apps

Sources: Hatchet blog, HN discussion
Summary: A practitioner guide from Hatchet distills running Postgres in production into concrete advice: index order aligned with ORDER BY, short transactions with minimal row locking, and batching writes for throughput. It then names the failure modes that bite at scale: autovacuum falling behind under high write volume, transaction ID wraparound risk, long migrations blocking autovacuum, CREATE INDEX locking writes without CONCURRENTLY, and remedies such as FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED for queues, range partitioning for near-instant deletes, and pg_repack over VACUUM FULL. It reached the Hacker News front page on 2026-07-22.
Why it matters: The operational failure modes it names, autovacuum bloat, wraparound, and locking DDL, are the ones that turn a working Postgres deployment into an incident, and they recur across teams.