Get things done, without drama.

boringSQL stands for core belief: truly reliable tech stack. Databases? They've been around for decades and they're battle-tested. SQL? Over 50 years old and still one of the most in-demand programming languages^[1].

PostgreSQL is a universe of its own - decades-tested, still the workhorse. Around it, a generation of analytical and embedded SQL engines is extending the same boring foundations: the relational model, SQL, query planners you can reason about. Master them through practical, hands-on learning that prepares you for real-world challenges.

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PostgreSQL MVCC, Byte by Byte

Two concurrent sessions, same page, different answers. An interactive tour of xmin, xmax, snapshots, and the visibility rules that decide what PostgreSQL lets you see.

Don't let AI touch your production database

Most PostgreSQL MCP servers are connection wrappers or provider gateways. Neither tells AI agent that its migration will lock a 4-million-row table. dryrun Postgres MCP does, from a JSON file committed to git.

Good CTE, bad CTE

The planner treats CTEs very differently depending on how you write them. Here's what happens under the hood, version by version, through PostgreSQL 18.

pg_regresql: truly portable PostgreSQL statistics

pg_regresql hooks into the PostgreSQL planner to trust injected catalog statistics instead of reading physical file sizes. Get accurate production-scale query plans in CI and test databases without the data.

Production query plans without production data

PostgreSQL 18 makes optimizer statistics portable. Export them from production and inject them into test databases to get realistic query plans without the data.

PostgreSQL Statistics: Why queries run slow

Slow PostgreSQL queries? Stale statistics are often to blame. Learn how the query planner uses statistics to estimate row counts and how to fix them.

Inside PostgreSQL's 8KB Page

A byte-level tour of the 8KB page. PostgreSQL's atomic unit of storage. We deep dive into page headers, line pointers, and free space using pageinspect to see exactly how your data lives on disk.

Reading Buffer statistics in EXPLAIN output

Learn how to interpret buffer statistics in PostgreSQL EXPLAIN output. Understand shared hits, disk reads, temp spills, and planning buffers to accurately diagnose and fix query performance bottlenecks.

Introduction to Buffers in PostgreSQL

How PostgreSQL actually manages memory, from shared_buffers and dirty pages to the OS page cache sitting underneath it all.

The hidden cost of PostgreSQL arrays

Deep dive into PostgreSQL arrays: why they're document storage in disguise, the TOAST performance trap, GIN vs B-tree indexing, the dangerous ANY() operator, and when junction tables beat arrays.