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PostgreSQL is Not Slow. Your Queries Are.

A field guide to the seven things that are actually making our database feel slow and how to stop blaming the wrong suspect. It usually starts with a Slack message: "The app feels slow". This is normally followed by a ticket, then an internal meeting, and finally someone, and there is always someone, saying: "I think we need to switch databases. PostgreSQL can't handle this load."
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How to know when your team needs PostgreSQL specialist support?

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and reliable open-source relational databases in the world. But even the best technology can start to lag when the team managing it lacks deep expertise. Many engineering teams reach a point where their general-purpose knowledge is simply no longer enough to keep up with growing demands. So how do you know when it's time to bring in a PostgreSQL specialist? The answer lies in recognizing specific patterns in your database performance, team's confidence, number of incidents, and architecture health.
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Cost of PostgreSQL performance issues

PostgreSQL is widely adopted because it removes licensing constraints and gives companies like OpenAI, Lovable, and Supabase, a reliable foundation for running production systems at scale. However, once deployed, the cost conversation of PostgreSQL shifts away from licensing and toward how efficiently the database supports the workload it is running.
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The 1 GB Limit That Breaks pg_prewarm at Scale

Recently, we encountered a production incident where PostgreSQL 16.8 became unstable, preventing the application from establishing database connections. The same behavior was independently reproduced in a separate test environment, ruling out infrastructure and configuration issues. Further investigation identified the pg_prewarm extension as the source of the problem. This blog post breaks down the failure, the underlying constraint, why it manifests only under specific configurations, and the corresponding short-term mitigation and long-term fix.
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pgNow Instant PostgreSQL Performance Diagnostics in Minutes

pgNow is a lightweight PostgreSQL diagnostic tool developed by Redgate that provides quick visibility into database performance without requiring agents or complex setup. It connects directly to a PostgreSQL instance and delivers real-time insights into query workloads, active sessions, index usage, configuration health, and vacuum activity, helping DBAs quickly identify performance bottlenecks. Because it runs as a simple desktop application.
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How PostgreSQL Scans Your Data

To understand how PostgreSQL scans data, we first need to understand how PostgreSQL stores it. A table is stored as a collection of 8KB pages (by default) on disk. Each page has a header, an array of item pointers (also called line pointers), and the actual tuple data growing from the bottom up. Each tuple has its own header containing visibility info: xmin, xmax, cmin/cmax, and infomask bits.
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Fixing ORM Slowness by 80% with Strategic PostgreSQL Indexing

Modern applications heavily rely on ORMs (Object-Relational Mappers) for rapid development. While ORMs accelerate development, they often generate queries that are not fully optimized for database performance. In such environments, database engineers have limited control over query structure, leaving indexing and database tuning as the primary performance optimization tools.
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PostgreSQL Materialized Views: When Caching Your Query Results Makes Sense (And When It Doesn’t)

Your dashboard queries are timing out at 30 seconds. Your BI tool is showing spinners. Your users are refreshing the page, wondering if something's broken. You've indexed everything. You've tuned shared_buffers. You've rewritten the query three times. The problem isn't bad SQL - it's that you're forcing PostgreSQL to aggregate, join, and scan millions of rows every single time someone opens that report.
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Unused Indexes In PostgreSQL: Risks, Detection, And Safe Removal

Indexes exist to speed up data access. They allow PostgreSQL to avoid full table scans, significantly reducing query execution time for read-heavy workloads.From real production experience, we have observed that well-designed, targeted indexes can improve query performance by 5× or more, especially on large transactional tables. However, indexes are not free. And in this blog, we are going to discuss what issues unused indexes can cause and how to remove them from production systems with a rollback plan, safely
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Scaling Up Wasn’t the Plan — Until It Was the Only Plan

If you have ever generated a complex report in Odoo only to watch the loading spinner for minutes, you are not alone. One of our customers ran into exactly this scenario: their system ground to a near stall whenever they tried to compile business reports. After a systematic investigation, we achieved a 93 % performance improvement, but only by choosing the last resort: upgrading the instance’s resources.
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