[hyperman1]

Very true. Postgres is a good product, using it in prod without much maintenance is very doable, and the planner is a good thing that regularly outsmarts me with a strategy that is better than what I had in mind. I am sitting on a 1TB db with it right now, expected to grow to ~10TB in the next few years. I like what postgres brings to the table for me.

But it's not all roses and rainbows. Draupnir seem cool, but it can't help you avoid the problem, only fix it faster.

At the core, there is a trade off here: Performance for predictability. You see the same thing in compilers, JITs and sometimes even processor cores. There is an optimizer in these things, that works 99% of the time, and makes things clearly better than human effort alone allows. But once in a while it guesses wrong, and you fall off a performance cliff.

Meanwhile, predictability is valuable in production, even to the point you might want to trade a serious dent in your performance for it.