The Portsmith Papers

A Hands-On Tour of PostgreSQL Beyond the Relational Model

Most PostgreSQL tutorials end where the interesting work begins. Once you know how to SELECT, JOIN, and GROUP BY, you've mastered perhaps twenty percent of what PostgreSQL can do. The remaining eighty percent — geospatial queries, semantic search, real-time notifications, fuzzy matching, vector embeddings, distributed coordination, columnar storage, and more — lives in an ecosystem of extensions, index types, and language features most practitioners never discover.

This book is a guided, hands-on tour of that other eighty percent, told through 24 chapters built around concrete engineering problems faced by the fictional city of Portsmith and its data platform team. Every chapter runs real exercises against real synthetic data — not just reading, doing.