How to make your SQL database faster

The text provides a comprehensive guide to diagnosing and addressing common SQL database performance issues, primarily within Postgres, before resorting to hardware upgrades. It highlights several key areas such as missing indexes, inefficient query patterns, and connection management as frequent culprits of slow database performance. The text emphasizes the importance of running EXPLAIN ANALYZE to understand what is causing the slowdown and suggests practical solutions like adding appropriate indexes, optimizing query structure, avoiding SELECT *, and using connection pooling. It also discusses advanced techniques like partitioning large tables, materializing expensive aggregations, and the mismatch of running analytical queries on transactional databases, suggesting the use of a columnar OLAP database like Tinybird for such workloads. Lastly, it cautions against relying solely on hardware improvements, advising that issues should be addressed at the query level first to ensure lasting performance enhancements.