PKPeter Kraft

1. Article · Sep 24, 2026 · Peter Kraft

   Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale | DBOS (opens the original)

   Excerpt · Critical tone · English

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   Recently, there has been no shortage of popular blog posts about how Postgres scales or why you should use it for everything. In this post, we'll do something a little different: describe an issue we had with a Postgres feature that intuitively should scale, but actually doesn't. SELECT DISTINCT is an innocuous-seeming clause that finds all unique values of a column. However, its performance characteristics aren't what you'd expect: no matter how you index your table, no matter how few unique va

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2. Article · Aug 3, 2026 · Peter Kraft

   Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY Actually Scales | DBOS (opens the original)

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   Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY has a bad reputation thanks in part to a popular blog post asserting it does not scale. If that were true, it would be a shame, because LISTEN/NOTIFY is a powerful tool, allowing you to use your Postgres database for low-latency durable notifications, streams, and pub/sub. The accusations aren’t wrong: NOTIFY has unintuitive and undocumented performance characteristics arising from its use of a global lock. But “unintuitive behavior” is not the same as “cannot scale.” In t

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