Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals (2014)

This article was also discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449329 Pat Shaughnessy has 3 other similar articles about Postgres internals. He does a great job of combining high level explanations, visual aids, and gritty details. Discovering the Computer Science Behind Postgres Indexes http://patshaughnessy.net/2014/11/11/discovering-the-compute... A Look at How Postgres Executes a Tiny Join http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/11/24/a-look-at-how-postgres-... Is Your Postgres Query Starved for Memory?…

I liked the article, and I know this is nitpicking, but I disagree that creating an index is the best solution for eliminating the sequential scan. Hopefully the next article mentions it. Just drop sort clause. Returning the user with the lowest id seems like an unusual use case. Imagine searching for a name in a phone book and only finding the oldest person with that name, or the person with the lowest phone number. More common cases are checking…