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SQL optimization is a dying art. Amazes me when I dig through software we've purchased to find abominations that I have to refactor. I've sent emails to developers with the fixes for shit we've paid for.

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Ah yes I love receiving Smug Reports[0] in my inbox. A 30,000' fix provided by someone with a 10' view of the code base and no business understanding outside their own organization.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ Number 4

Could it be that you have the 30,000' view, while they had a ground view and climbed up a mountain to fix the view for all those in their town?

Out of frustration I've broke out IDA Pro enough times to scratch my own itch that it's turned me to into a near Stallman-esque fan of open source software. When you work for small companies, bug reports on proprietary software issue trackers often get neglected.

Ah yes, I love receiving Smug Responses from developers who think they know what's best for their spaghetti code. I've been working with SQL longer than some of these kids have been alive. I know my shit, and I know when a query pings my slow query logs because of inefficient nonsense. Generally your end users have put it through far more paces, than you who probably don't use it in any production capacity. There's ZERO excuse for poor indexes, or NONE at all! Do what you want with the provided fix, because I've already applied to our systems to keep the server from crumbling.

That seems like a pretty dismissive take. I've been on the other side of some truly ignorant bug reports, but I've also sent reports with code that, to the best of my knowledge, resolves the problem. If I received a bug report wherein someone was clearly annoyed with software they paid me for but still put the effort into trying to understand and resolve on their own, I'd probably prioritize that email and try to be empathetic about it.

This.

I fear the usage of ORM are slowing the web and developers SQL knowledge is atrophying along with it. I miss the days of crushing a query from 0.4s to 0.0014s. I've see some pretty ludicrous SQL execution plans generated by ORMs.

No joke, finding that eureka moment of cutting query times down a few orders a magnitude is one of my great pleasures.

Better, automated tools for optimization are needed. Postgres ecosystem right now lacks a lot of things that enterprise systems have for decades.

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