Interview with pgMustard
Find out more about our sponsor pgMustard
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the 2025 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
pgMustard helps people optimize Postgres queries, by visualising EXPLAIN output and adding performance tips.
What is your PostgreSQL centered product or service?
Our product is a visualization tool for EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, that also gives performance advice. The advice is written for (and by) humans, and tips are scored based on an estimate of their time-saving potential. Experienced folks tell us it saves them time, and people newer to Postgres performance work tell us they learn new things while using it! We're particularly proud of its design, and how simple we've kept it.
How does your company contribute and benefit from PostgreSQL?
We make a lot of small contributions in and around the Postgres community. We blog on performance topics, and sometimes review drafts of posts for others too. We also publish a monthly newsletter, maintain an EXPLAIN glossary, and co-host a weekly podcast (called Postgres FM). We are trying to get a little braver at chiming in on the mailing lists when we have something useful to add. In terms of how we benefit, we especially appreciate work from others that makes Postgres better or easier to understand for users, including educational material, performance improvements, and of course improvements to EXPLAIN itself.
What is the most important feature in the latest PostgreSQL release
Postgres 17 included a very cool improvement that improves the performance of queries with IN clauses that use B-tree indexes. Postgres 18 builds on this to allow skip scans, enabling multi-column B-tree indexes to be efficiently used by queries that don’t reference the leading column! If you’d like to learn more about these changes, you might like the "Skip Scan" Postgres FM interview with Peter Geoghegan.
Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
Due to its wide deployment base, and given it helps people identify their slowest queries, we probably benefit the most from pg_stat_statements. We love its simplicity, low overhead, and wide availability. Another firm favourite of ours is auto_explain, which is especially valuable for looking into queries that are only intermittently slow.
Are there any interesting talks which your staff have presented at other conferences?
For folks newer to Postgres performance work, we presented A beginners guide to EXPLAIN at a Timescale Day event. For more experienced people, a better talk might be A Deeper Dive into EXPLAIN we presented at an EDB-run Postgres London event.
