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| Web | https://andyatkinson.com |
| Newsletter | https://pgrailsbook.com/ |
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The rise of larger vehicles like SUVs and pickup trucks, with their taller hoods and larger blind zones, has contributed to a 75% increase in pedestrian and cyclist deaths since 2009.
Until we design better streets and ban these vehicles, people outside these vehicles will keep dying.
Andrew Atkinson: Scaling Rails at Aura Frames: Splitting to 8 Primary DBs and Reaching #1 in the App Store
📌 Overview Ruby on Rails has helped make it possible to scale out the database layer, meeting the demands of millions of Aura Frames customers enjoying their digital photo frames. In late 2025, the team added additional primary databases to expand capacity for peak write and read load ahead of Christmas Day, the busiest day of the year for the company. Rails manages queries and schema changes for each primary database within the same codebase, and now with the additional capacity of many primary databases. With 8 primary databases in total, each server instance can be vertically scaled ahead of peak load. When load returns to normal levels, instances are scaled down for cost savings. The team leveraged native support for Multiple Databases and the disable_joins: true feature in Active Record, the ORM for Ruby on Rails. The disable_joins feature replaces SQL joins, issuing multiple SELECT statements to combine data in the application from different databases. This post looks back at the technical details of that plan, as well as a variety of additional data layer scaling tactics, that culminated in a successful Christmas 2025 season, with peak U.S. and Canadian Apple App Store and Google Play Store rankings of #1.
From Christmas Outage to #1 App Store Ranking: An Aura Frames Postgres Scaling Retrospective
https://andyatkinson.com/postgresql-rds-scaling-aws-christmas-day-peak
📌 Overview On Christmas Day 2024, Postgres infrastructure powering the Aura Frames API had problems under peak load, being unavailable for three hours and disrupting the experience for new customers. The team knew it would need improvements to handle the surge for Christmas 2025 and beyond. One year later, much of the resource intensive data access was reworked, the Postgres infrastructure was upsized, and this approach not only survived, but thrived, providing reliable service through the holiday season. The sum of Transactions Per Second (TPS) across the DBs peaked at 226,000, with more than 100K TPS sustained for 10 hours and repeating on multiple days after Christmas, with an average query time of 25 microseconds. The improved reliability meant customers could smoothly set up new frames and add photos, and they did it more than ever, with the Aura Frames app reaching #1 in U.S. and Canadian Apple and Android App Stores on Christmas Day. In this post we’ll look back at the months of planning and execution that went into achieving that outcome! A second post in this series will dig into the Ruby on Rails side, while this one will focus on Postgres.
Excited to share details from Postgres (RDS) work I helped with last year!
https://andyatkinson.com/postgresql-rds-scaling-aws-christmas-day-peak
📌 Overview On Christmas Day 2024, Postgres infrastructure powering the Aura Frames API had problems under peak load, being unavailable for three hours and disrupting the experience for new customers. The team knew it would need improvements to handle the surge for Christmas 2025 and beyond. One year later, much of the resource intensive data access was reworked, the Postgres infrastructure was upsized, and this approach not only survived, but thrived, providing reliable service through the holiday season. The sum of Transactions Per Second (TPS) across the DBs peaked at 226,000, with more than 100K TPS sustained for 10 hours and repeating on multiple days after Christmas, with an average query time of 25 microseconds. The improved reliability meant customers could smoothly set up new frames and add photos, and they did it more than ever, with the Aura Frames app reaching #1 in U.S. and Canadian Apple and Android App Stores on Christmas Day. In this post we’ll look back at the months of planning and execution that went into achieving that outcome! A second post in this series will dig into the Ruby on Rails side, while this one will focus on Postgres.
First leg. Second city. XO Ruby Seattle. August 8th. If you're apart of the Seattle Ruby community or the Seattle dev community at large we wanna hear from you. Tell us what we need to know.
Coworking 💻. Coffee ☕. Spots only Seattle natives know 🤫. Drop it all in the comments 👇
Tell a friend to tell a friend we're coming to town 🚗💨.
#XORuby #XORuby2026 #RubyOnRails #PacificNorthwest #SaltLakeCity #Seattle #Vancouver #RubyCommunity
Spring Bank Holiday, Memorial Day, Whit Monday - whatever holiday is happening around you today, take advantage of our annual SPRING SALE!
Hand-picked books for right now -
50% off with code Spring2026
Details - see our most recent newsletters:
https://pragprog.com/news/index.html
📣 Chicago & Midwest PostgreSQL community!
Get ready for #PGDATA2026 — a new 2-day PostgreSQL conference coming June 4–5, 2026 at @LoyolaChicago’s Water Tower Campus 🎉
Learn, connect, and grow with DBAs, developers, and researchers driving open-source innovation in the Midwest.
#Postgres #PostgreSQL #PGDATA2026 #Chicago #PrairiePostgres #TechConference #OpenSource
Back in November, I met with Claire Giordano, host of the Talking Postgres podcast, who asked a ton of great questions about my experience writing a Postgres book aimed at Ruby on Rails web developers.
New post: Five Postgres anti-patterns I keep seeing in Rails apps and how to fix them.
David Ho
Planet PostgreSQL
Lobsters
XO Ruby
Pragmatic Bookshelf 📚
PGDATA 2026
Douglas J Hunley
shey