A trades table with 50 million rows. The query "which active trades for this user this month" takes 4 seconds. After applying the four techniques in this article: 12 ms . This isn't magic — it's a solid understanding of what PostgreSQL actually does under the hood. I already covered slow query diagnosis with EXPLAIN ANALYZE basics . Here we go further: the four levers that make a real difference on high-volume production tables. JSONB: storing flexible schemas without sacrificing performance Every crypto exchange exposes a different API. Binance returns a clientOrderId , Kraken a userref , Coinbase a client_order_id nested inside a sub-object. If you create a dedicated column for each field from each exchange, your table ends up with 40 columns where 35 are NULL for every single row. JSONB solves this problem — provided you understand when to use it. json vs jsonb — always use jsonb json stores the raw text as-is. jsonb decomposes it into a binary representation at insert time.…