AWS, Cloud & Database Architecture
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Banking-grade AWS deployments, multi-cloud trade-offs, and database design at scale. The architectural decisions that prevent 3am incidents.
SQL Server & PostgreSQL Database Health Check Guide
Every production database accumulates the same class of problems over time. Indexes fragment as rows are inserted and deleted unevenly. Dead tuples pile up faster than background processes can reclaim them. Queries that once ran against a small table now scan tens of millions of rows because nobody added an index when the table grew. […]
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PostgreSQL Prepared Statements: Fix Plan Caching Memory Issues
Prepared statements are one of PostgreSQL’s most powerful features for query optimization. By parsing and planning queries once, then reusing those plans for subsequent executions, they can dramatically improve performance. But this optimization comes with a hidden danger: sometimes caching the same plan for every execution can lead to catastrophic memory exhaustion and performance degradation. […]
Read more →WordPress on AWS Graviton: Deploy & Migrate in Minutes
Running WordPress on ARM-based Graviton instances delivers up to 40% better price-performance compared to x86 equivalents. This guide provides production-ready scripts to deploy an optimised WordPress stack in minutes, plus everything you need to migrate your existing site. Why Graviton for WordPress? Graviton3 processors deliver: The t4g.small instance (2 vCPU, 2GB RAM) at ~$12/month handles […]
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WordPress Database & Media Cleanup Plugin: Free Guide
If you run a WordPress site for any length of time, the database quietly fills with junk. Post revisions stack up every time you hit Save. Drafts you abandoned years ago sit there. Spam comments accumulate. Transients expire but never get deleted. Orphaned metadata from plugins you uninstalled months ago quietly occupies table rows nobody […]
Read more →Memgraph & Claude Desktop: Detect Mule Accounts on macOS
1. Introduction This guide walks you through setting up Memgraph with Claude Desktop on your laptop to analyze relationships between mule accounts in banking systems. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a working setup where Claude can query and visualize banking transaction patterns to identify potential mule account networks. Why Graph Databases for […]
Read more →How to Trigger Autoscaling Events with stress-ng Command
If you are testing how your autoscaling policies respond to CPU load then a really simple way to test this is using the “stress” command. Note: this is a very crude mechanism to test and wherever possible you should try and generate synthetic application load.
Read more →AWS CLI Setup on Mac: Install and Configure in Minutes
You can absolutely get the following from the AWS help pages; but this is the lazy way to get everything you need for a simple single account setup. Run the two commands below to drop the package on your Mac. Then check the versions you have installed: Next you need to setup your environment. Note: […]
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Aurora PostgreSQL: Archive Partitions to S3 Iceberg & Parquet
A Complete Guide to Archiving, Restoring, and Querying Large Table Partitions When dealing with multi-terabyte tables in Aurora PostgreSQL, keeping historical partitions online becomes increasingly expensive and operationally burdensome. This guide presents a complete solution for archiving partitions to S3 in Iceberg/Parquet format, restoring them when needed, and querying archived data directly via a Spring […]
Read more →AWS S3 ETags: Verify File Integrity Using MD5 Hashes
I was playing with S3 the other day an I noticed that a file which I had uploaded twice, in two different locations had an identical ETag. This immediately made me think that this tag was some kind of hash. So I had a quick look AWS documentation and this ETag turns out to be […]
Read more →How to Scale Cloud Consumption Without Costly Mistakes
Introduction This article follows on from the “Cloud Migrations Crusade” blog post… A single tenancy datacenter is a fixed scale, fixed price service on a closed network. The costs of the resources in the datacenter are divided up and shared out to the enterprise constituents on a semi-random basis. If anyone uses less resources than […]
Read more →SSH EC2-User Login Fix for WordPress Bitnami Instances
So after getting frustrated (and even recreating my ec2 instances) due to a “Permission denied (publickey)”, I finally released that the worpress builds by default as set up for SSH using the bitnami account (or at least my build was). This means each time I login using ec2-user I get: Being a limited human being, […]
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Multistage Build Optimisation: The Difference Between Amateur Containers and Production Systems
Most teams assume containers are lightweight by default, but that assumption does not survive contact with a real production system. Containers become bloated, slow, insecure, and operationally expensive when left unmanaged, and the penalties compound at scale as CI pipelines slow down, deployments lag, autoscaling becomes inefficient, and infrastructure costs quietly rise. This post goes […]
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