© Laurenz Albe 2022 For detailed query performance analysis, you need EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) output for an SQL statement. With a parameterized statement, it can be difficult to construct a run-able statement for EXPLAIN (ANALYZE). Sometimes, you don’t even know the parameter values. I’ll show you how you can get at least plain EXPLAIN output […]

© Laurenz Albe 2021 UPDATED July 2023: EXPLAIN ANALYZE is the key to optimizing SQL statements in PostgreSQL. This article does not attempt to explain everything there is to it. Rather, I want to give you a brief introduction, explain what to look for and show you some helpful tools to visualize the output. Also, […]

A couple of weeks ago I have seen a horribly designed, 370 billion (with a “b”) row Oracle database monster running some sort of aggregations. Due to the sheer amount of data I naturally thought about how I would implement the same thing in PostgreSQL. What I noticed is that most people would actually implement […]

The goal of the PostgreSQL optimizer is to provide you with a plan, which executes as fast as possible and returns all the data as rapidly as possible. In short: The game is about overall execution time of queries. However, there are cases in which you are not interested in receiving the entire result as […]

PostgreSQL knows a parameter called effective_cache_size. To many this is one of the most mysterious settings in the entire PostgreSQL config. Maybe this is the core reason why many people just completely ignore this setting – in many cases this is not the best idea of all. effective_cache_size can have a serious impact on execution […]