© Laurenz Albe 2020 A while ago, I wrote about B-tree improvements in v12. PostgreSQL v13, which will come out later this year, will feature index entry deduplication as an even more impressive improvement. So I thought it was time for a follow-up. Deduplication for B-tree indexes If the indexed keys for different table rows […]

  Since I only recently learned about the concept of “killed index tuples”, I thought there might be some others who are not yet familiar with this interesting PostgreSQL concept. This may give you an explanation the next time you encounter wildly varying execution times for the same execution plan of the same PostgreSQL query. […]

  Foreign key constraints are an important tool to keep your database consistent while also documenting relationships between tables. A fact that is often ignored is that foreign keys need proper indexing to perform well. This article will explain that and show you how to search for missing indexes. Index at the target of a […]

  We all know that you have to pay a price for a new index you create — data modifying operations will become slower, and indexes use disk space. That’s why you try to have no more indexes than you actually need. But most people think that SELECT performance will never suffer from a new […]

Why should I get rid of unused indexes? Everybody knows that a database index is a good thing because it can speed up SQL queries. But this does not come for free. The disadvantages of indexes are: Indexes use up space. It is not unusual for database indexes to use as much storage space as […]