How to Ride Elephants Safely: Working with PostgreSQL when your DBA is not around

A survival guide for developers who may occasionally be called upon to perform the duties of a PostgreSQL DBA. This talk covers logging into the database, starting and stopping it, taking backups, diagnosing performance or stability issues by reading logs, identifying changes to improve performance, and understanding PostgreSQL's directory and file structure. It also touches upon configuration, access control (pg_hba.conf), maintenance tasks like vacuuming, and how to monitor and optimize database performance.