Indexing a 4-billion-row Postgres table without downtime

How we used CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY and a phased rollout to add a multi-column index without a maintenance window.

Background

This is a placeholder body, seeded automatically. Edit this post in /admin/posts to replace it with the real article.

What we did

• Step one — analysed the situation
• Step two — proposed a plan
• Step three — shipped it

What we learned

Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one — but you only know that after testing the non-obvious answers first.

A short code sample:

function helloPandasofts(name: string) {
  return `Hi ${name}, welcome to the studio journal.`;
}

Wrapping up

That's the gist. Read more in the studio journal or say hello.