Database Incident Language
5 exercises — practise the English vocabulary for database incident communication: replication lag, deadlock identification, connection pool exhaustion, failover vs. switchover, and WAL-based crash recovery.
Database incident vocabulary quick reference
- Replication lag: replica is N seconds behind primary — stale reads are possible
- Deadlock: two transactions block each other — one is rolled back as the victim
- Pool exhaustion: kill idle-in-transaction connections; consider PgBouncer
- Failover: unplanned promotion after primary failure (vs. switchover = planned)
- WAL: Write-Ahead Log — append-only change log; enables crash recovery and replication
- PITR: Point-in-Time Recovery — base backup + WAL replay to any previous moment
Question 1 of