This document summarizes the challenges and solutions for maintaining large PostgreSQL databases at Emma, including: - Maintaining terabytes of data across multiple clusters up to version 9.0 - Facing performance issues when the hardware load was pushed to its limits - Dealing with huge catalogs containing millions of data points that caused slow performance - Addressing problems like bloat, backups that took hours, system resource exhaustion, and transaction wraparound issues - Implementing solutions such as scripts to clean up bloat, sharding to a Linux filesystem, and increasing autovacuum thresholds