PostgreSQL Consultant & DBA · Production Support
4+ years of production PostgreSQL work, first as a DBA at one of Nepal's leading payments platforms and now with enterprise clients at Stormatics. I get to the real cause of a problem and explain it in a way the team can act on.
📍 Kathmandu, Nepal
📧 mr.shridharkhanal7@gmail.com
🔗 Always open to interesting opportunities and collaborations
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PostgreSQL Consultant & DBA
Stormatics · Kathmandu, Nepal (UTC+5:45)
I'm a PostgreSQL consultant with 4+ years of production database work, first as a DBA at Khalti, one of Nepal's leading payments platforms, and now with enterprise clients at Stormatics. I'm the lead engineer on client accounts and the first person their teams call when something breaks in production.
I've upgraded multi-terabyte databases from legacy releases and fixed XID wraparound and corruption on live tables. I like getting to the real cause of a problem and explaining it in a way the team can act on. EDB certified, with nine published articles: six on Planet PostgreSQL and three featured in Postgres Weekly.
Years in Production
Published Articles
Avg. Query Time Cut
Uptime Supported
EDB Postgres AI High Availability Essentials v6
EDB · Aug 2026
EDB Postgres AI Database Advanced v18
EDB · Jul 2026
AWS Academy Graduate – Cloud Architecting
Amazon Web Services · Sep 2024
A comprehensive toolkit for building and maintaining enterprise-grade data infrastructure
Also experienced with
A timeline of my professional journey and the impact I've made at each organization
Real production problems I've worked on, from incident response to upgrades, backups and monitoring
Transactions tables at a payments platform were heading for XID wraparound with corrupted primary keys. A rebuild timed at 3 hours on a drill copy was too long, so I built a trigger-synced copy, deduplicated it, added the key and swapped it in with minimal downtime.
Upgraded multi-terabyte production databases from legacy PostgreSQL 9.x to modern releases with pg_upgrade --link. Written up as "Upgrading PostgreSQL 9.6 to 17 with pg_upgrade".
Dropped unused indexes, added missing ones and tuned parameters, cutting average query time by ~30%. Slow ORM queries were rewritten as plain SQL, and EXPLAIN ANALYZE drives each index choice: B-tree, GIN, partial or composite.
Rebuilt a transactions table to stop an autovacuum crash-restart loop, cutting its size by 78%. Removed duplicate rows using ctid and rebuilt a corrupted index concurrently on the live database.
Set up repmgr streaming replication with near-zero replication lag, supporting 99.9% uptime, and now set up and maintain Patroni HA clusters for clients, including minor and major upgrades on RHEL and Ubuntu.
Set up pgBackRest backup and restore over SSH and TLS in production after testing TLS end to end in a lab, plus WAL archiving with point-in-time recovery and a script that builds new standbys automatically.
Designed access for a banking-software client's third-party DBAs that lets them do their job without SUPERUSER. Written up on Planet PostgreSQL as “The Right Way to Give a Third-Party DBA Access to Your PostgreSQL Database”.
Built TimescaleDB continuous aggregates for a solar-energy client and used ltree to cut query time by 45%.
Set up Grafana with Prometheus, postgres_exporter and node_exporter plus SQL health-check functions, PMM log monitoring with alerts, and log analysis with pgBadger and Loki. Caught WAL piling up on disk before it turned into an outage.
Practical PostgreSQL write-ups from the field: performance, high availability, disaster recovery and security, published on Stormatics and Medium.
crash recovery
stormatics.techSignal 1 should only reload PostgreSQL's config, so why did it trigger crash recovery? Part 1 covers PostgreSQL signals and the postmaster.
Security Hardening
stormatics.techGiving an external team access to your PostgreSQL database is one of those decisions that deserves a little thought. The easiest option is to hand over a superuser account, but it's rarely the right one. A better…
Zero Downtime Updates & Migrations
stormatics.techWhen you are upgrading across major PostgreSQL versions, there are a few ways to go. Dump and restore is the simplest to reason about, but downtime scales directly with database size, so for anything multi-terabyte, it…
StormaticsIf you've read the pgBackRest DR guide on this blog, you already know the standard setup: two servers, passwordless SSH, pgBackRest pulling backups across the wire. It works reliably, and it's what most teams run. SSH…
StormaticsHave you ever left for home on a Friday evening feeling confident about your work for the day, at peace knowing your system would survive the coming weekend? We’ve all felt that way at some point. Meanwhile, the disk on…
StormaticsSSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. Its successor is TLS (Transport Layer Security), but in the PostgreSQL world, and in most documentation, people still call it SSL out of old habit. Don’t let that confuse you. When…
StormaticsA field guide to the seven things that are actually making our database feel slow and how to stop blaming the wrong suspect. It usually starts with a Slack message: "The app feels slow". This is normally followed by a…
Testimonials
Here's what my colleagues and clients say about working with me
"I highly recommend Shridhar Khanal for his exceptional skills in database management and administration. His proactive approach, keen attention to detail, and commitment to excellence make him a valuable asset to any team."
Sagar Dhakal
Software Engineer, Cloco Nepal
"A great professional with strong commitment and passion for work. He never complains about pressure but solves problems efficiently with a positive attitude. His SQL knowledge and logical thinking are commendable."
Rabin Acharya
Data Engineer, Infinite Solutions
"Shridhar Khanal is an outstanding Database Administrator with expertise in database design, performance tuning, and security. His work ensures smooth operations and reliability in data infrastructure."
Amrit Karki
Software Engineer, John Snowlabs
"Shridhar Khanal's expertise in database management and administration is remarkable. His proactive mindset, problem-solving skills, and meticulous attention to detail set him apart as a top professional."
Suman Sharma
Software Engineer
"An exceptional Database Administrator and Python Developer, Shridhar excels in SQL, PostgreSQL, and Python. His technical and digital marketing skills make him a well-rounded and invaluable asset to any team."
Yubraj Adhikari
Flutter Developer
Looking for PostgreSQL expertise, database optimization, or need help scaling your infrastructure? Let's connect and discuss how I can help.
Location
Kathmandu, Nepal