Chapter 14. Performance Tips

Table of Contents

14.1. Using EXPLAIN

14.1.1. EXPLAIN Basics
14.1.2. EXPLAIN ANALYZE
14.1.3. Caveats

14.2. Statistics Used by the Planner

14.2.1. Single-Column Statistics
14.2.2. Extended Statistics

14.3. Controlling the Planner with Explicit JOIN Clauses

14.4. Populating a Database

14.4.1. Disable Autocommit
14.4.2. Use COPY
14.4.3. Remove Indexes
14.4.4. Remove Foreign Key Constraints
14.4.5. Increase maintenance_work_mem
14.4.6. Increase max_wal_size
14.4.7. Disable WAL Archival and Streaming Replication
14.4.8. Run ANALYZE Afterwards
14.4.9. Some Notes About pg_dump

14.5. Non-Durable Settings

Query performance can be affected by many things. Some of these can be controlled by the user, while others are fundamental to the underlying design of the system. This chapter provides some hints about understanding and tuning PostgreSQL performance.