SLAs feel reassuring when signed—but their substance lies in what happens behind the scenes. Often, the most damaging breaches don’t stem from cloud outages or server failures, but from invisible issues hidden in how PostgreSQL was initially set up and configured. Increasingly sluggish queries, split-brain scenarios, silent backup failures, any of these can suddenly explode into customer-facing crises. 1. Slow Queries: The Sneaky SLA Saboteur The Hidden Cost of Delayed Queries A seemingly minor tuning oversight, like a missing index or outdated statistics, can turn a 200 ms query into a 10-second slog. It might not seem urgent initially, but as concurrency increases, cascading delays build up. A Slow Query Accelerated 1000× In one case study, an engineer faced a painfully slow query that scanned 50 million rows through a sequential scan—even though it was a simple query filtering on two columns (col_1, col_2) and selecting by id. After creating an index using those columns plus an INCLUDE (id) clause, the query performance improved dramatically: what had taken seconds dropped to just milliseconds, representing up to a 1,000× improvement in the worst-case runtime. [Ref: Learnings from a slow query analysis in PostgreSQL] This shows how even a simple query, if not indexed properly, can pose an SLA risk as data volume increases.

One of the things I admire most about PostgreSQL is its ease of getting started. I have seen many developers and teams pick it up, launch something quickly, and build real value without needing a DBA or complex tooling. That simplicity is part of what makes PostgreSQL so widely adopted. However, over time, as the application grows and traffic increases, new challenges emerge. Queries slow down, disk usage balloons, or a minor issue leads to unexpected downtime. This is a journey I have witnessed unfold across many teams. I don’t think of it as a mistake or an oversight; it is simply the natural progression of a system evolving from development to production scale. The idea behind this blog is to help you assess your current situation and identify steps that can enhance the robustness, security, and scalability of your PostgreSQL deployment.