Database administration
Installation, performance tuning, backup/recovery, and high availability.
A lab notebook for databases that have to stay up.
71 Data Labs is a personal engineering blog and lab notebook about what actually happens when databases and data pipelines run in production: replication that falls behind, query plans that flip overnight, CDC streams that silently drift, and benchmarks that only mean something when the methodology is written down next to them.
Who runs it
My name is Jatin Rathod. I work as a Database Administrator, and I’m moving into data engineering. In practice that means I spend my days keeping other people’s databases alive, and my evenings learning the systems that sit downstream of them.
I’ve been working with PostgreSQL for more than five years. Most of what gets written here started as an incident, a slow query, or a question I couldn’t find a straight answer to.
Everything published here is written from things I’ve actually run. Where a benchmark appears, the methodology and the hardware appear with it. Where I’m unsure, I say so.
What the site covers
Data engineering
ETL/ELT pipelines, batch vs. streaming, data quality, and cloud platforms.
Data architecture
Data modeling, warehouse/lake/lakehouse design, and choosing the right database.
DevSecOps for data
CI/CD for schema migrations, infrastructure as code, and policy-as-code.
Data security
Encryption, access control, masking, auditing, and database hardening.
Data governance and data guardianship
Classification, lineage, stewardship, retention, and compliance.
Labs
Benchmarks with methodology, home-lab experiments, and real cost breakdowns.
Career and practice
Incident post-mortems, tools and checklists, and the DBA-to-data-engineer roadmap.
Nothing is published yet. Get the first post on the homepage