Cost-saving tactics: what works in practice
Cost control in PostgreSQL isn’t about cutting corners — it’s about doing things deliberately. A few practices we recommend across all mature environments:
- Monitor and right-size continuously: Don’t wait for budget season to optimize. Tools like PMM let you spot underutilized resources before they become sunk costs.
- Optimize indexes regularly: Unused indexes eat I/O and vacuum cycles. Quarterly audits save money and improve query performance.
- Tune vacuum behavior: Adjust autovacuum thresholds to reflect real-world write patterns. Avoid I/O spikes, reduce bloat early.
- Back up efficiently: Combine weekly full backups with daily incrementals to reduce bandwidth and storage consumption.
- Reduce transfer costs: Keep databases and applications close to each other. In-region and in-cluster traffic is cheaper.
- Test failure plans: A good failover plan is only as valuable as your last rehearsal. Practice keeps downtime — and its costs — low.
Cost savings aren’t just possible – they’re measurable
Or why paying for PostgreSQL support can still save you 50% on your TCO
Running PostgreSQL efficiently takes more than installation. It takes deliberate planning on day one, ongoing tuning, and smart scaling as demands grow.
Percona provides end-to-end expertise to help at every stage — from architecture reviews and performance tuning to index optimization, vacuum strategy, query analysis, and high availability design. And we back it with production-ready, open source software built to run at scale, without licensing fees or hidden costs.
Worried the cost of support or services might outweigh the savings? In practice, our customers save up to 50% on infrastructure costs — even with services included. And that’s before you account for what’s avoided: unplanned outages, rushed upgrades, and costly performance issues down the road.