You know you’re wrong at database administrating, when…

1. Don’t monitor free space on disk

DO: Just do it, and not some simple trigger on 10% free left space, but either how many days till day X.

2. Don’t make check backups

So you use some tools for backing up your database, but when day X comes, you can not restore from it.

DO: every backup needs to be restored.

3. Don’t monitor slowest/frequent queries

DO: there is different approaches for that, but the simplest one is pgBadger with syslog.

4. Don’t use int4 as pk for append-only tables

DO: just use bigint. Rails make bigint as default for pk in 5.1. Hopefully, Django will make it in 2.x.

5. Don’t restart database on every error you see.

DO: hire DBA (just joking). Try to find a root cause with your monitoring. May be it’s just bad statics on table and you need to run ANALYSE table.