alt.hn

2/13/2026 at 6:12:58 PM

Postgres Locks Explained: From Theory to Advanced Troubleshooting

by theotherbrian1

2/13/2026 at 6:12:58 PM

I've worked as a support engineer focused on Postgres, and I’ve spent the past two years helping teams debug lock-related issues in production. Lock tooling and resources are not great as of now. They're either standalone, narrow articles, or are overwhelming, or provide little context to beginners.

So I built the resource I wish I had when I was learning.

It:

- explains locks

- provides demos on how they work

- has a tool that shows what blocks what

- outlines troubleshooting strategies with real world examples

- reviews 7 Postgres monitoring tools

by theotherbrian1

2/14/2026 at 9:36:02 AM

Very well written! Definitely learned some new things about PG. Thanks for the resource :)

by ramon156

2/14/2026 at 7:54:17 AM

there's also pglocks.org if you don't want the unnecessary ad slop

by y0eswddl

2/14/2026 at 6:02:03 PM

I deliberately wrote the site as impartially as I could.

In the monitoring section, I praised Datadog and PGAnalyze as having the best lock monitoring tools. One could argue that is an ad, but I included my criteria for the judgement and substantiated it with a full review of the services.

I'd like to add that I have no financial incentives to praise either company. I don't work for or own equity in them. In the case of Datadog, I actually have reasons to dislike them due their opaque pricing structure and also because their sales team woke me up from a nap (twice) to ask me about my trial.

I started building it to give to customers I worked with so I wouldn't have to explain locking from scratch over and over.

The site is just Sveltekit, relying on highlight.js for code formatting. There are no Google, Facebook, etc. trackers present, which you can see for yourself in the source code.

If you can point out what you construed as an ad, I'll try to update it to sound less commercial.

by theotherbrian1