Last night, Gabrielle, David & I talked about an "EXPLAIN for dummies" talk. I don't think that I'm quite ready to do that. So, instead, how about we talk about performance?

Gabrielle & I will present a few items from Chapter 4 of the Douglas' PostgreSQL book. These are oriented toward solving problems inside of a database.

I have a real-world example of a performance problem that I used a combination of EXPLAIN and the pg_stat/pg_statio tables to diagnose. I'll run through that example - complete with pl/pgSQL functions and maybe a little perl. Gab & I will also put together some other interesting examples to run through.