Postgres audit tables saved us from taking down production

Audit tables record changes that occur to rows in another table. To convince you of the stability-related value of audit tables, we'll cover how audit tables helped us avoid a serious incident. We'll briefly cover how you can create audit tables in your own Postgres databases. Ingestion latency was spiking, but after we discovered the bug in our code, we were able to quickly reverse the removal of these shard metadata entries using our audit tables. Without the audit table, this minor incident would have been much more severe because it would have been much more difficult to track down which shards were deleted and to quickly re-add those shards back to the table. Audit tables aren't just useful for seeing who changed what in your database. If that sounds appealing and you're okay with the overhead of introducing a few triggers to the table you're auditing, consider creating audit tables in your own system.