All you need is PostgreSQL
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A deep-dive into building a complete financial transaction system using only PostgreSQL 18, arguing against the common reflex of adding specialized infrastructure. The post walks through designing schemas for a banking-style API with managed/external accounts, stateful transfers, and immutable transactions. Key techniques covered include: SQL 2011 temporal tables for account activity periods, domain types for data integrity, constraint triggers enforcing a transfer state machine, HOT updates via fillfactor tuning for write throughput, cursor-based pagination over composite primary keys, incremental balance ledger maintenance via triggers, and serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) to prevent write skew. The design also uses updatable views as a decoupling mechanism, replacing the need for microservices. Benchmarking results for a startup-scale scenario are included.
