SQL Server or PostgreSQL — the question is rarely “which database is better?” but “which one fits your budget, your team and your platform?”. Whoever confuses the two questions migrates for the wrong reasons and only notices once the licensing bill shrinks while operating costs grow. Quick overview: Prerequisite: Hands-on SQL Server experience is all you … Read more
An empty repo and Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent in the terminal — that’s all it takes to get going. And that is exactly the problem: the model writes code immediately, but by default nothing ensures that a specification exists first, that a review happens afterwards, or that the database schema deploys reproducibly. A Claude … Read more
In many projects the database schema lives in the database instead of the repository — grown out of years of hand-run ALTERs, fully documented nowhere. It only becomes visible when a second environment is needed or a deploy breaks. Postgres database CI/CD flips that relationship: the repository describes the desired state, and every environment — from the throwaway … Read more
The bug was a typo in an ALTER TABLE — and it was found by the staging deploy on a Friday afternoon. Yet that exact find is automatable: set up a GitHub Actions Postgres deployment against a throwaway database, and every pull request becomes a full dress rehearsal. Syntax and semantic errors, ordering problems, and broken idempotency surface before … Read more
The backfill ran a second time on the second deploy — and overwrote values that had been corrected by the business in the meantime. Accidents like this are not prevented by discipline, only by a memory: if you want to track database schema changes without introducing Flyway or Liquibase, all it takes is exactly one table and … Read more
The ALTER TABLE ran through cleanly on your machine — on staging, the same deploy fails with column “country_code” of relation “customer” contains null values. The difference is not the SQL, it is the data: the local table was empty, the one on staging was not. If you want to add a NOT NULL column to an existing table that … Read more
The schema is done — now what? The reflex answer is Flyway or Liquibase. But for a small, database-centric project, a migration tool is often more machinery than the task calls for: its own version table, a runtime dependency, a file format you commit to. There is another way. Deploying a Postgres schema without a migration … Read more
A data migration from SQL Server to PostgreSQL rarely fails at actually copying the data. It fails at the silent differences that only surface in the target: datetime, which knows no time zone, bit, which is not a boolean, an IDENTITY that turns into a sequence, and a collation that suddenly compares case-sensitively. Anyone who sets out to migrate SQL Server to PostgreSQL isn’t … Read more
The row counts match — table by table, source against target, all green. And yet the migration isn’t finished. In one column, NULL values have turned into empty strings; in another, the detour through a CSV file rounded the last decimal of an amount; and a handful of accented characters collapsed into question marks. Same count is not … Read more
The data is over, the schema stands — and then there are 200 stored procedures sitting there that no tool translates for you. pgloader migrates tables and data, but the logic in procedures, functions, and triggers stays behind. This is the phase that’s actually work: porting T-SQL to PL/pgSQL, line by line, with understanding instead of search-and-replace. The … Read more
