The Sev-1 Database

The Sev-1 Database

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Incident RCA

[RCA] PostgreSQL Limit Nobody Monitors: How MultiXact Member Exhaustion Caused Four Outages in One Week
Metronome's dashboards showed 50% utilization. PostgreSQL still refused all writes. The blind spot: MultiXact member space vs ID count
 • Haider Z
10 Lessons I Learned After Resolving 1,000+ Database Incidents (Sev-1)
Practical 10 lessons for DBAs, SREs, and engineers managing production databases.
 • Haider Z
What I Capture During a PostgreSQL Sev‑1 So My RCA Isn’t Guesswork
Learn why PostgreSQL root cause analysis often fails after Sev-1 incidents, how evidence disappears, and how DBAs should approach incident RCA…
 • Haider Z
PostgreSQL Sev-1 Survival Guide: 15+ Emergency SQL Queries
Production down? Use this guide. Copy-paste SQL queries for lock contention, bloat, and wait events. Resolve PostgreSQL Sev-1 incidents fast.
 • Haider Z
Full RCA Deep Dive: How a Missing Connection Pooler Triggered a $10,000/Minute Downtime in Production
Why your App is one retry loop away from Disaster and how pooling saves you
 • Haider Z
PostgreSQL at 100% CPU with Normal Query Load: The $2M Lesson in Stale
PostgreSQL running at 100% CPU even with normal queries? Learn how stale statistics mislead the planner, spike CPU, and cost millions. Includes RCA…
 • Haider Z
Full RCA Deep Dive: PostgreSQL Security Upgrade Outage
FATAL: unsupported authentication method: 10 Why Client Drivers Killed the Zero-Downtime Upgrade
 • Haider Z
PostgreSQL SCRAM Upgrade Disaster: The MD5 Language Barrier
It was supposed to be the safest day on the job. The goal: Upgrade PostgreSQL security from the ancient, weak MD5 hashing to the ironclad, modern…
 • Haider Z
Deep Dive RCA: The $2.5 Million Panic How a Silent PostgreSQL feature almost Cost Everything
Because sometimes, the real outage isn’t the crash it’s what you didn’t monitor.
The $19,000/Minute PostgreSQL Out-Of-Memory Disaster (and How to Prevent It)
I watched a $1B product crash due to the hidden math of work_mem in PostgreSQL default settings. Learn how to identify volatile memory spikes and…
 • Haider Z
$10M Launch Saved: Fix PostgreSQL High CPU in Minutes
We had 30 minutes to fix this 95% CPU spike on Azure PostgreSQL.
 • Haider Z
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