5. Failing to efficiently monitor and optimize performance

Performance degradation in PostgreSQL rarely happens overnight. Instead, small inefficiencies accumulate silently—a poorly written query here, an overlooked index there—until one day, your application grinds to a halt. By the time your phone rings with complaints, you're already dealing with unhappy users and potential business impact. Reactive troubleshooting under pressure is far more costly and stressful than catching issues early through proactive monitoring.

But that doesn’t mean you have to pay more for monitoring. While proprietary database vendors use this fear to sell expensive monitoring tools as mandatory add-ons, the PostgreSQL ecosystem offers open source alternatives that provide equal or better visibility without the premium price tags.

Consider this: Your team launched a new feature without implementing proper monitoring. Initially, performance was fine, but as data volume grew, query times silently degraded. What could have been detected through open source monitoring tools weeks earlier became an emergency weekend fix, costing your team sleep and your company credibility—all while avoiding the tens of thousands in licensing fees that proprietary monitoring solutions would have charged.