8. Performant SQL

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Optimize database use to allow more queries to be executed with fewer resources
• Implement index and sequential scans and understand when to most effectively use them
• Interpret the output of EXPLAIN ANALYZE
• Understand the benefits of using joins in place of other functionality
• Identify bottlenecks in queries
• Implement triggers in response to specific events
• Create and use functions to create more sophisticated and efficient queries
• Identify long-running queries and terminate them

In this chapter, we will improve the performance of some of our previous SQL queries. Now that we have a good understanding of the basics, we will build upon this foundation by making our queries more resource and time efficient. As we begin to work with larger datasets, these efficiencies become even more important, with each computational step taking longer to compute...