Logging with Purpose: A Framework for Finding and Fixing Slow Queries in Postgres
Presented by:
Ryan Booz
Ryan is a Solutions Engineer at pganalyze. Ryan has been working as a PostgreSQL advocate, developer, DBA and product manager for more than 25 years, primarily working with time-series data on PostgreSQL and the Microsoft Data Platform.
Ryan is a long-time DBA, starting with MySQL and Postgres in the late 90s. He spent more than 15 years working with SQL Server before returning to PostgreSQL full-time in 2018. He’s at the top of his game when he's learning something new about the data platform or teaching others about the technology he loves.
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Postgres offers many tools for query observability, but many teams struggle to use them effectively. Some collect too little data and miss important performance problems, while others log everything—creating noise, overhead, and confusion without clear next steps.
In this talk, we’ll present a practical framework for configuring Postgres logging and query analysis with a single goal: identifying the queries that are actually worth fixing. Based on experience helping dozens of customers monitoring hundreds of Postgres databases across managed services, Kubernetes, and self-hosted environments, we’ll explore how to balance visibility, performance impact, and signal-to-noise.
We’ll show how extensions like pg_stat_statements and auto_explain, along with query logging and built-in metrics views, work together to surface meaningful optimization opportunities, and how to avoid common pitfalls such as over-tuning maintenance settings or enabling logging without a plan for analysis.
Finally, we’ll examine three common query patterns that frequently appear in application code, explain why they can cause performance issues, and discuss practical approaches to rewriting or restructuring those queries.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Ops
- Difficulty:
- Medium