PostgreSQL DBA Practice Questions

Most PostgreSQL quizzes online stop at “what does VACUUM do.” These don’t. They’re built around what actually breaks in production and what comes up when you’re interviewing for a Postgres role: choosing between pgBackRest and pg_dump and knowing why, what a major version upgrade with pg_upgrade touches, how Patroni decides to fail over, and where connection pooling stops helping.

There’s also a set on EDB’s commercial stack — EPAS, Failover Manager, and BDR — which is hard to find practice material for anywhere. If you’re working in an EDB shop or migrating off Oracle, that’s the section to start with.

Where to start

Coming from Oracle? Architecture, PL/pgSQL, and the Oracle-to-Postgres migration set. The mental model shift is bigger than the syntax.

Running Postgres in production? Backup and recovery first, then partitioning and indexing. Restore is the one everybody assumes they know.

Interviewing? Architecture, indexing, and replication. Those three carry most technical screens.

Every question includes an explanation. Free, no signup, roughly 15 minutes each.