Postgres Performance Guides: Indexing, Query Tuning & Autovacuum

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• Zero-Downtime Postgres Migrations on an SMB Budget July 29, 2026

  Adding columns, backfilling, and dropping indexes without pager pain — without a dedicated platform team.

• Autovacuum Tuning for the SMB: A Field Guide July 28, 2026

  The 3 tables worth manual autovacuum tuning and the rest that should stay on defaults.

• Postgres as a Queue: The Locking Hotspot Pattern July 27, 2026

  Why SELECT ... FOR UPDATE queues silently deadlock past 500 jobs/sec and what to do about it.

• Reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE Without a DBA: A 15-Minute Guide July 24, 2026

  The four patterns that explain 80% of slow queries when you read an execution plan for the first time.

• Five Cases Where a Partial Index Is the Right Answer July 23, 2026

  Workload patterns where a small, partial index dramatically outperforms the obvious full index.

• AWS RDS Performance Insights vs. Third-Party Tools in 2026 July 22, 2026

  What Performance Insights covers, what Pganalyze still wins at, and where a human DBA beats both.

• Spotting N+1s in Your ORM Before They Page You at 3 AM July 21, 2026

  The pattern that takes a 50 ms endpoint to 2 s under load — how to find and fix it in Rails, Django, Hibernate, and Prisma.

• Reading pg_stat_statements: A Practical SMB Workflow July 20, 2026

  A step-by-step process for 2–5 person engineering teams to extract the real slow queries worth fixing first.

• The Hidden Write Cost of 'Just Add an Index' July 17, 2026

  Every new composite index speeds reads but slows writes — how to quantify the tradeoff before you CREATE INDEX.

• When to Trust Your DBA, Not Your AI: Safe Slow-Query Review July 16, 2026

  Why autonomous query optimizers are dangerous in production and how expert-assist workflows catch what AI misses.

• The 9-Step Postgres Major-Upgrade Playbook for Teams Without DevOps July 15, 2026

  From version check to cutover to rollback plan — what a 3-person engineering team actually needs to run a major upgrade.

• Slow-Query Review Without Seeing Your Data July 14, 2026

  How a schema-only clone + query log lets outside experts diagnose performance without touching customer rows.

• How the Postgres Query Planner Picks a Plan June 30, 2026

  A senior-DBA walkthrough of how the postgres query planner uses statistics and a cost model to pick scans and joins, and how to read it in EXPLAIN.

• pg_stat_statements Tutorial: Find Slow Queries June 30, 2026

  A practical pg_stat_statements tutorial: enable the extension, read its key columns, and triage the real top offenders in your Postgres database.

• Postgres Bloat: Autovacuum and VACUUM Tuning June 30, 2026

  How Postgres bloat happens through MVCC dead tuples, how autovacuum works, and how to tune vacuum thresholds and run VACUUM and REINDEX safely.

• How Postgres Parallel Query Execution Works June 30, 2026

  How parallel query execution works in Postgres: parallel workers, gather nodes, planner GUCs like max_parallel_workers_per_gather, and when it helps.

• PgBouncer Connection Pooling: Modes and Sizing June 30, 2026

  PgBouncer connection pooling explained: session vs transaction pool modes, how to size a Postgres connection pool, and prepared-statement traps to avoid.

• Postgres Index Types: BRIN, GIN, GiST & More June 30, 2026

  A practical tour of Postgres index types beyond B-tree — when to use a BRIN index, GIN index, or GiST index, and where Hash and SP-GiST fit.