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Postgres Performance Guides: Indexing, Query Tuning & Autovacuum

Practical guides on Postgres query performance — reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, pg_stat_statements triage, index DDL, write-path impact, and autovacuum tuning. These notes are informed by real query reviews submitted to Querk by engineers at scale-ups and enterprises.

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Slow-Query Review Without Seeing Your Data June 26, 2026
How a schema-only clone + query log lets outside experts diagnose performance without touching customer rows.
Zero-Downtime Postgres Migrations on an SMB Budget June 25, 2026
Adding columns, backfilling, and dropping indexes without pager pain — without a dedicated platform team.
Autovacuum Tuning for the SMB: A Field Guide June 24, 2026
The 3 tables worth manual autovacuum tuning and the rest that should stay on defaults.
Postgres as a Queue: The Locking Hotspot Pattern June 23, 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 June 22, 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 April 29, 2026
Workload patterns where a small, partial index dramatically outperforms the obvious full index.
AWS RDS Performance Insights vs. Third-Party Tools in 2026 April 28, 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 April 27, 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 April 24, 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' April 23, 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 April 22, 2026
Why autonomous query optimizers are dangerous in production and how expert-assist workflows catch what AI misses.