Index Usage Monitoring
Learn to monitor index effectiveness using system views and identify unused or underperforming indexes.
Why Monitor Index Usage?
Indexes are powerful tools for speeding up queries, but they aren't free. They consume disk space and add overhead to data modifications (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE).
Monitoring index usage helps us understand if our indexes are actually working for us or just taking up space.
Introducing `pg_stat_user_indexes`
PostgreSQL provides several system views to monitor database activity. For index usage, the pg_stat_user_indexes view is your best friend.
This view tracks statistics for indexes on user-defined tables, giving you insights into how often each index is being scanned.