ost of the time, a book about optimization is viewed as a book for DBAs. Since our goal is to prove that optimization is more than just building indexes, we hope that this book will be beneficial for a broader audience.

This book is for IT professionals working in PostgreSQL who want to develop performant and scalable applications. It is for anyone whose job title contains the words “database developer” or “database administrator” or who is a backend developer charged with programming database calls. It is also useful to system architects involved in the overall design of application systems running against a PostgreSQL database.

What about report writers and business intelligence specialists? Unfortunately, large analytical reports are most often thought of as being slow by definition. However, if a report is written without considering how it will perform, the execution time might end up being not just minutes or hours, but years! For most analytical reports, execution time can be significantly reduced by using simple techniques covered in this book.