SQL is a declarative language: you ask the database to execute something on the data it contains, but you do not specify how the database is supposed to complete the SQL statement. For instance, when you ask to get back some data, you execute a SELECT statement, but you only specify the clauses that specify which subset of data you need, not how the database is supposed to pull the data from its persistent storage. You have to trust the database – in particular, PostgreSQL – to be able to do its job and get you the fastest path to the data, always, under any circumstance of workload. The good news is that PostgreSQL is really good at doing this and is able to understand (and to some extent, interpret) your SQL statements and its current workload to provide you with access to the data in the fastest way.
However, finding the fastest path to the data often requires an equilibrium between searching for the absolute fastest path and the time spent in...
