PostgreSQL's query optimizer has improved massively over the past decade. Using the Join Order Benchmark (JOB), this author shows that tail latency has been nearly halved between PostgreSQL versions 8 and 16, with each major version offering an average 15% performance increase. One of the best decisions teams can make to make their database query speeds faster is to simply keep their Postgres instances up to date.

A developer found that a webpage that was used for performance tracking was really slow. They discovered that inefficient SQL queries were causing long delays. By understanding the SQLite query planner, the developer added indexes and a materialized view to improve the database query performance and thereby speed up the page load time.