Humanity simply doesn’t have a brain capable of it. People can only mentally relate to a certain number of people or ideals. Anything else becomes foreign. Our animal brains see foreign things as potential threats, and puts up guards. Suddenly, a person starts to wonder: why don’t those other people do it the way we do? The ‘it’ here can be anything: Religion, politics, pick any subject. That question evolves into a disagreement, then an argument, then a schism, and so on.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be pushing a long discussion regarding Postgres (PostgreSQL) table partitioning. I’ve covered it in previous articles, but only regarding basic performance considerations. That’s a very limited view of what partitioning can offer; there’s a lot more variance and background that deserves elucidation. So for the next few articles, the topic of discussion will be partitioning. There’s not really enough of it, and a lot of the techniques used in the field are effectively pulled straight from the documentation.

We’re finally at the end of the 10-part Postgres (PostgreSQL) performance series I use to initiate new developers into the database world. To that end, we’re going to discuss something that affects everyone at one point or another: index criteria. Or to put it another way: Why isn’t the database using an index? It’s a fairly innocuous question, but one that may have a surprising answer: the index was created using erroneous assumptions.

An easy way to give Postgres (PostgreSQL) a performance boost is to judiciously use indexes based on queries observed in the system. For most situations, this is as simple as indexing columns that are referenced frequently in WHERE clauses. Postgres is one of the few database engines that takes this idea even further with partial indexes. Unfortunately as a consequence of insufficient exposure, most DBAs and users are unfamiliar with this extremely powerful functionality.

I apologize for putting this series on a short hiatus last week for the 4th of July. But worry not, for this week is something special for all the developers out there! I’m going to try to make your life easier for a change. Screw the database! As a Postgres (PostgreSQL) DBA, it’s easy to get tied up in performance hints, obscure syntax, and mangled queries, but it’s really all about the people.