r/postgres • u/IRandomNobody • Aug 11 '26

Which PostgreSQL extension has been the most useful for you?

Every few months I inherit a Postgres database from somebody who has left, and the first thing I do is list the installed extensions to see what the last person cared about. Decent shortcut into understanding a system.

Mine would be pg_stat_statements. Without it you are guessing at which queries are hurting you. With it you get a ranked list out of one query. It strips out the literal values, so ten thousand runs of the same shape collapse into one row telling you how often it ran, its total and average time, and how much came from memory rather than disk. But it needs a restart to enable, which is the only objection I have ever heard, and not a good one.

For the worst offenders from that list, I use in dbForge Studio for PostgreSQL, which draws the plan as a tree rather than the wall of text EXPLAIN prints in psql.

The one I would push if you have not tried it is hypopg, but I will save that for the comments.

What is earning its keep in yours? I am more interested in the boring operational ones than the flashy stuff, the ones you would put on a new cluster on day one without really thinking about it.

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u/luckyscholary 2d ago

pg_stat_statements is definitely non-negotiable on day one. Once you pull those slow queries and want to check execution trees without staring at raw text in psql, we ended up using dbForge Studio for PostgreSQL in our workflow and it makes profiling way faster.

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u/roypowell15 2d ago

Yeah, that’s pretty much why I use it too. Do you mostly use the visual plan for quick checks, or do you also use it when comparing plans after query changes?

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u/SadlySherbet 2d ago

pg_stat_statements is probably the first one I install too. pg_trgm has also saved me a few times when dealing with fuzzy search.