SQL Performance Masterclass.
A practical ebook for writing fast, scalable SQL. Fifty pages, pulled from years of staring at slow queries in production. It's tight, opinionated, and written to be read in a single afternoon — then kept open on a second monitor every time you touch a query plan.
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EXPLAIN · INDEXES · JOINS
SQL
Performance
Masterclass
PostgreSQL & MySQL
By
Aysun Itai
- Pages
- 50
- Format
- Read
- 2h read
- Covers
- PostgreSQL & MySQL
Inside this volume
What you'll be able to do by the last page.
- Read query plans with confidence and spot the real bottleneck on the first pass.
- Design indexes that the planner actually picks — and know when an index is making things slower.
- Choose the right join strategy (nested loop, hash, merge) for the data and the hardware.
- Paginate huge tables without OFFSET pitfalls — keyset pagination, done properly.
- Aggregate millions of rows without dragging the server down.
Contents · 06 parts
Read it cover to cover in an afternoon.
Every chapter is short on purpose — no padding, no theory for theory's sake. Each one ends with the smallest experiment you can run on a real database tonight.
- 01
Reading EXPLAIN like a query planner
Cost, rows, width, and the difference between a sequential scan that's fine and one that isn't.
- 02
Indexes that actually get picked
B-tree vs. hash vs. GIN, covering indexes, partial indexes, and why the planner ignored yours.
- 03
Joins, properly
Nested loop, hash, and merge joins — when each is fast, when each is a trap, and how the optimizer chooses.
- 04
Pagination at scale
Why OFFSET is a tax on every page, and how to switch a paged endpoint to keyset pagination in an afternoon.
- 05
Aggregation without surprises
GROUP BY, window functions, materialized views, and the surprisingly common mistakes around DISTINCT.
- 06
A production checklist
What to run before a release, what to monitor after, and the one query you should always have at hand.
Who this is for
Written for working engineers.
Profile · 01
Backend engineers shipping production features.
Profile · 02
Tech leads onboarding a team to a new database.
Profile · 03
Instructors teaching practical SQL performance.
Vol. 01 · 2026 Edition
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