Database engineering
PostgreSQL architecture, high availability, upgrades, replication, capacity planning, and production operations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oleg Gurov Database engineer, performance specialist, and technical leader.
I have spent more than 14 years working where databases, software, infrastructure, and engineering teams meet - from administering systems and writing production code to leading DBA teams and setting technology strategy as a CTO.
- PostgreSQL
- High-load systems
- Performance
- Automation
WHAT I DO
Engineering for systems that have to work.
My core field is PostgreSQL engineering: architecture, configuration, high availability, performance analysis, migrations, observability, upgrades, backup strategy, and the Linux systems underneath the database. I have also worked extensively with ClickHouse and with mixed data platforms that include Kafka, MongoDB, Greenplum, Redis, and etcd.
The recurring theme is making complex operational work
understandable and repeatable. That may mean tracing an incident
with perf, eBPF, and database statistics; designing
a controlled migration; automating cluster deployment; or
turning an experienced DBA's reasoning into a tool that another
engineer can inspect and trust.
THE JOURNEY
From systems and code to database products.
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2005-2010
Engineering education in industrial electronics
Completed a five-year university program in industrial electronics and graduated with the professional qualification of Engineer.
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2010-2013
Systems and software foundations
Started in system administration, then moved into C++, Python, PostgreSQL, multithreaded business logic, database tooling, and full-stack development.
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2013-2018
PostgreSQL engineering
Owned database architecture, tuning, upgrades, backup automation, ETL, partitioning, bloat reduction, monitoring, and infrastructure capacity for a growing analytics product.
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2018-2022
Scale, performance, and team leadership
Led DBA work, designed high-availability systems, audited high-load PostgreSQL and ClickHouse installations, and helped deliver an online migration involving 400K+ tables, 1M+ indexes, 8 TB+ of data, and 15K+ TPS.
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2022-2025
Technology strategy and database products
As technical director and CTO, led distributed engineering teams and the strategy for a PostgreSQL-based DBMS, monitoring and management software, and automated database cluster deployment and backup platforms.
CONTACT
Get in touch.
For questions about PG Tools, PostgreSQL engineering, or the ideas behind the project, email and Telegram are the most direct ways to reach me.
WHY PG TOOLS
Operational knowledge should be executable.
PG Tools distills lessons from production audits, migrations, performance investigations, platform development, and team runbooks into small open-source utilities. Each tool has a narrow responsibility, explicit safety boundary, and evidence that can be reviewed by a human or consumed by automation.
The goal is not to replace engineering judgment. It is to give that judgment better inputs, repeatable workflows, and artifacts that make the next decision easier to defend.