Indexing on PG Blog

Database Indexing and Query Optimization for Java Developers

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Fixing N+1 queries (see the previous post) gets your Hibernate app down to a handful of queries per request. The next bottleneck is what each of those queries costs once your tables have millions of rows — and that is almost always a question of indexing.

An index turns “scan every row” into “look it up directly.” Get the index wrong — or skip it — and a query that took 2ms in development takes 4 seconds in production once real data volume shows up.

Database Indexing and Query Optimization for Python Developers

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Fixing N+1 queries with select_related/prefetch_related or selectinload (see the previous post) gets you down to a small, sane number of queries per request. The next bottleneck is what each query costs once the table has millions of rows — and that is almost always about indexing.

An index turns “scan every row” into “look it up directly.” Skip it, and a query that’s instant in development takes seconds once real data volume shows up in production.