Free · practical · independent
Prove your production skills to employers and strengthen your next job application with evidence of what you can diagnose, change, recover, and operate safely. Learn in plain language, practise with real PostgreSQL, and build proof across 15 modules and two final assessments.
PostgreSQL administration field guide
Public, evidence-led articles for real PostgreSQL operations: locate the active configuration, read the plan, understand the wait, prove the backup, and rehearse the upgrade before production makes the decision for you.
Browse every field noteReal practice, no setup
Sign in, start the lab, and run SQL in an isolated database managed by the site. You do not need your own database, cloud account, or Neon account. The database is removed when you finish or it expires.
The certification pathway
Each module has three short learning sections, a guided real-SQL lab, a knowledge assessment, and a module certificate you can share.
Understand the service model, preserve data integrity, and establish secure access.
Explain how PostgreSQL processes, memory, data directories, clusters, databases, schemas, catalogs, and WAL interact.
Use suitable data types, constraints, DDL, DML, transactions, rollback, and safe query practices.
Apply ownership, role membership, least privilege, authentication concepts, pg_hba.conf, and access auditing.
Use workload evidence to improve access paths, plans, and blocking behaviour safely.
Choose B-tree and specialist indexes using selectivity, workload, multicolumn order, expressions, storage cost, and write overhead.
Interpret EXPLAIN, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, estimates, scans, joins, sorts, statistics, and common plan failures.
Reason about isolation, blocking, lock modes, long transactions, deadlocks, and safe intervention.
Manage connections, maintenance, and capacity through evidence-backed operational practice.
Manage connection lifecycles, pooling, configuration scopes, memory settings, reloads, restarts, and resource trade-offs.
Explain tuple visibility, dead tuples, freezing, transaction ID risk, vacuum tuning, and bloat diagnosis.
Establish workload baselines, interpret catalog and monitoring signals, recognise saturation, forecast capacity, and design actionable alerts.
Protect recoverability through WAL, validated backups, and rehearsed recovery.
Reason about WAL generation, checkpoints, durability, write pressure, disk layout, and safe storage decisions.
Select logical or physical backup approaches, define retention, connect RPO/RTO to implementation, and collect evidence of recoverability.
Execute restore workflows, choose recovery targets and timelines, verify recovered state, and plan rehearsals.
Make safe replication, incident, and change decisions under real operational constraints.
Diagnose streaming replication and slot behaviour, evaluate synchronous trade-offs, interpret lag, promote safely, and avoid split brain.
Triage impact, preserve evidence, interpret competing signals, mitigate proportionately, escalate clearly, and support post-incident learning.
Plan maintenance, define rollback criteria, evaluate extension compatibility, execute upgrades or migrations, validate outcomes, and maintain runbooks.
Evidence for employers
Use the evidence on a CV, portfolio, LinkedIn profile, or job application. It supports a conversation about your skills; it does not guarantee employment or employer acceptance.
Applied production skills across performance, recovery, replication, incidents, and safe change.
Transparent assessment with knowledge thresholds, practical objectives, and mandatory safety gates.
A public verification page showing credential status, version scope, assessed skills, and how it was earned.
How certification works
Reading alone never issues a credential. Every success is tied to demonstrated work.
Build the production model and inspect real operational evidence.
Run real SQL in a private, disposable PostgreSQL database.
Meet the knowledge, applied-practice, and safety requirements.
Publish a verified module win only when you choose to.
Pass both final assessments and earn the full credential.
The continuing operator toolkit
Return throughout your career for symptom-led Runbooks, repeatable labs, incident drills, and diagnostic references—whether you are refreshing a skill or responding to the system in front of you.
Achievement examples
Examples show the issued format without inventing learner identities, pass rates, or employer endorsements.
Confirms one assessed competency, its version context, and verified issue record.
Records completion of 15 modules plus independently passed practical and reasoning finals.
Future pathways
Further PostgreSQL certifications will be added later, after this production-operator pathway is complete and trustworthy.
Method and independence
pgdba.dev is free to the learner, independent from the PostgreSQL project, and non-proctored. It does not claim accreditation, official endorsement, or guaranteed employment.
Read the methodology and disclosures →