Best Practices for Tuning Slow Postgres Queries

In this session I'll walk through what I've learned tuning slow Postgres queries over the years. We'll start with a quick recap of the basics (EXPLAIN ANALYZE), and then go through my iterative process how I evaluate the root cause of a query's slowness.

To help you identify root causes more effectively we'll go through common pathological Postgres planner decisions, that can make a query slower than it should be, and discuss when you may want to use tools like pg_hint_plan to understand alternate query plans that were available but not chosen by Postgres.