Troubleshoot Slow Queries Using Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizations

Working with query plans in Postgres can be a huge help to improve query performance. EXPLAIN plans themselves can be confusing and hard to understand. There’s now several query plan tools that can help make sense of things and some even offer advice for next steps to take for improving query performance.

Michael Christofides will be at Postgres Meetup for All this month to talk about EXPLAIN plan visualization tools. He recently published a popular blog post about explain tools: https://www.pgmustard.com/blog/postgres-query-plan-visualization-tools. Michael is an expert at EXPLAIN and wrote a planner tool (also his business) called pgMustard.

This meeting will be a presentation about EXPLAIN tools and we’ll get to work hands on with them. Michael will give us some query plans to work with as we go through this session. We’re also open to a BYOQ (Bring Your Own Query) if you have something you want to test out with the group.