Being part of gnarly production outages isn’t uncommon. In this talk, I will share short entertaining stories about a few head scratching production outages we faced and how we used efficient and simple PostgreSQL features in Rails to build scalable solutions. I will also discuss how and when to use certain PostgreSQL concepts in Rails, such as optimistic and pessimistic locking, using real-life examples that power core customer features. Finally, I will discuss uses of Postgres mutex to manage concurrent access to shared resources and wrap up by sharing our own experiences and lessons from other production outages. This will help you avoid common operational pitfalls and improve your application's reliability and query patterns.