[hn_throwaway_99]

Did someone pee in your coffee this morning?

I know very clearly how it works. It's essentially a tradeoff: don't create indexes by default, and you don't take the hit of creating indexes but then hit the risk of queries starting to fall over due to lack of indexes when you start to scale. Alternatively, create the indexes (again, by default), with the risk that you may be creating ones you don't need.

Importantly, all I am recommending is what the default behavior is - I still think you should be able to opt out when creating the FK. It's just that (a) in my experience you do end up wanting an index at least 80-90% of the time, and (b) not adding indexes usually has much worse implications than adding them unnecessarily.

Also, this is obviously an easy thing to get wrong given the number of times I've seen different developers hit this, and the fact that different DB engines have settled on different defaults (e.g. MySQL does automatically create FK indexes and requires an index on all FKs).

But please, continue, let me know what an idiot I am.

[timacles]

lol get a real dba, saying you know so many developers hitting a particular issue is just another way of saying I know so many people who don’t know what they’re doing.

RDBMS are complex and have to handle the most wide variety of applications of any modern software in existence.

Accommodating your particular niche use case of make Postgres be my own magical dba because I don’t know how to run a simple query to check if my FK columns have indexes is pretty silly.