The Query Performance Playbook
Indexes, execution plans and the art of a fast SELECT
By Omar El Alaoui
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About the book
What you’re getting into
Most slow applications are just slow queries wearing a trench coat. This book teaches you to see what the database is really doing — execution plans, index usage, join strategies — and to fix the queries quietly dragging everything down. It's hands-on and grounded in engines like Postgres and MySQL, written for engineers who'd rather tune a query than bolt on another cache.
After you’ve read it
What you’ll be able to do
- Read an execution plan and trust what it tells you
- Design indexes that speed reads without wrecking writes
- Write predicates the planner can actually use
- Recognise and undo accidental full-table scans
- Tame joins, grouping and sorts that spill to disk
- Keep statistics honest so plans stay stable
- Cut lock contention and deadlocks under concurrency
- Run a repeatable measure-fix-measure tuning loop
Table of contents
- 01
How the Database Thinks
- What the optimizer is solving
- Rows, pages and I/O
- Reading a slow query's story
- 02
Reading Execution Plans
- Scan versus seek
- Join algorithms compared
- Estimated versus actual rows
- 03
Indexes That Earn Their Keep
- B-tree fundamentals
- Composite and covering indexes
- When an index does more harm than good
- 04
Queries the Planner Likes
- Sargable predicates
- Avoiding accidental scans
- Rewriting subqueries and CTEs
- 05
Joins, Aggregation and Sorting
- Join order and selectivity
- Grouping efficiently
- Sorts that spill to disk
- 06
Statistics, Cardinality and Skew
- Keeping stats fresh
- Skewed data and bad plans
- Hints and plan stability
- 07
Transactions and Contention
- Isolation levels in practice
- Lock waits and deadlocks
- Designing away contention
- 08
A Tuning Workflow
- Finding the queries that matter
- Measuring before and after
- Knowing when to stop
The full chapter list, exactly as it appears in your PDF.
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