Schema design checklist

From Postgres FM by Nikolay Samokhvalov and Michael Christofides

April 17, 2026 · 45 min · Episode 177

About this episode

Nik and Michael discuss a checklist for designing new schema in Postgres.

Nik and Michael discuss a list of things to check when designing new schema in Postgres. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Use BIGINT in Postgres (blog post by Ryan Lambert) https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2021/06/postgres-bigint-by-default Postgres 18 and UUIDv7 (blog post by Gwen Shapira) https://www.thenile.dev/blog/uuidv7 How to use UUID (how-to guide by Nik) https://postgres.ai/docs/postgres-howtos/schema-design/data-types/how-to-use-uuid Our episode on constraints https://postgres.fm/episodes/constraints Our episode on NULLs https://postgres.fm/episodes/nulls-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-and-the-unknown MultiXact member space exhaustion episode (with Metronome) https://postgres.fm/episodes/multixact-member-space-exhaustion Our Column Tetris episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/column-tetris Saving Space Basically for Free (blog post by James Coleman from Braintree) https://medium.com/paypal-tech/postgresql-at-scale-saving-space-basically-for-free-d94483d9ed9a Over-indexing episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/over-indexing Under-indexing episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/under-indexing Gadget's use of Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/gadgets-use-of-postgres…

People in this episode

Hosts: Nikolay Samokhvalov, Michael Christofides

Topics covered

schema design
Postgres
data types
constraints
UUID
indexing
partitioning

Keywords

schema design
Postgres
UUID
constraints
indexing
data types
BIGINT

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Postgres, Braintree