[firloop]

The numbers can be useful, but I mainly pay attention to the steps the query planner takes. Is it doing an expensive loop over data? Is it using an index? Those can often be more illuminating than the numbers – you get a feel over time for what operations are actually expensive.

[eyelidlessness]

I’m glad it’s helped you. I’m saying that I never got that feel over time, and I was hoping for something illuminating in the article, but it is describing things that aren’t actually in the examples it provides... or there’s something I’m not seeing? It does me no good to be told “look for where the planner and execution are different”, and they’re the same in the example, or “you’ll see this tool highlight those differences red” and there’s no difference I can find. I’m open to the possibility I’m missing something but I’ve stared at these and similar EXPLAIN results and tooling analyses for endless hours and can’t see what I’m supposed to learn from them.