Monitoring Postgres EXPLAIN plans

The Basics

First time looking at EXPLAIN, or trying to understand how query plans work?

Start here: The Basics of Postgres Query Planning

Postgres Plan Nodes

Understanding the behavior and performance of individual plan nodes (and when Postgres chooses them for a plan) is critical to understanding overall query planning.

Node types can be broadly considered in three categories:

  • Scan nodes: Produce rows from underlying table data
  • Join nodes: Combine rows from child nodes
  • Other nodes: Broad variety of functionality (e.g. aggregation, limiting, grouping, etc)

Query Plan Visualization

pganalyze includes built-in visualization of query plans, automatically collected from the Postgres logs:

Plan Visualization Example

Set up automatic EXPLAIN plan collection

Learn how to enable automatic EXPLAIN plan collection.

pganalyze EXPLAIN Insights

Wondering how you should optimize a particular query?

pganalyze automatically analyzes EXPLAIN plans to find the most important insights:

  • Disk Sort
    When a Sort operation spills to disk due to low work_mem settings
  • Expensive
    When particular nodes are more expensive than others in a plan
  • Hash Batches
    When a Hash operation spilles to disk due to low work_mem settings
  • Inefficient Index
    When an index is inefficient because it's loading too much data and then filters rows without an index
  • I/O Heavy
    When most plan I/O happens in just a few plan nodes
  • Large Offset
    When OFFSET is used for pagination, instead of an efficient method such as keyset-based pagination
  • Lossy Bitmaps
    Bitmap Heap Scan that utilizes a lossy bitmap due to low work_mem
  • Mis-Estimate
    The Postgres planner mis-estimated the number of rows a particular plan node returns
  • Slow Scan
    Sequential Scan that removed a significant number of rows (an index would have helped to avoid this)
  • Stale Stats
    The table referenced has not had an ANALYZE run recently (potentially leading to inefficient plans)



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