Even from intial reviews of my previous post on expression based indexes I received a lot of questions and feedback around many different parts of indexing in Postgres. Here’s a mixed collection of valuable tips and guides around much of that. Unused Indexes In an earlier tweet I joked about some SQL that would generate the SQL to add an index to every column: # SELECT 'CREATE INDEX idx_' || table_name || '_' || column_name || ' ON ' || table_name || ' ("' || column_name || '");' FROM information_schema.

If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on support of Postgres 9.2 on Heroku. One of those awesome features, is pg_stat_statements. Its not commonly known how much information Postgres keeps about your database (beyond the data of course), but in reality it keeps a great deal.

Update theres a more recent post that expands further on where to start optimizing specific queries, and of course if you want to dig into optimizing your infrastructure High Performance PostgreSQL is still a great read For many application developers their database is a black box. Data goes in, comes back out and in between there developers hope its a pretty short time span. Without becoming a DBA there’s a few pieces of data that most application developers can easily grok which will help them understand if their database is performing adequately.