Database Services

Managed services like AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, or DigitalOcean Managed Databases handle backups, patching, minor version upgrades, and multi-AZ failover automatically. For most businesses this is the right choice because the operational overhead of managing these aspects yourself outweighs the cost premium. Self-hosted databases are appropriate when you need specific configurations that managed services do not support, or when data sovereignty requirements prohibit using a managed cloud provider.

We start by enabling slow query logging at your database layer with an appropriate threshold — typically queries taking more than 100ms. We then analyse the log to identify the queries with the highest total execution time (frequency multiplied by duration), review the query execution plans using EXPLAIN or EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and add or modify indexes to reduce full table scans. We measure query times before and after each change to confirm improvement.

Connection pooling maintains a pool of open database connections that application instances share, rather than each application instance opening its own connection. This becomes necessary when you have many concurrent users because databases have limits on simultaneous connections. If your application uses a framework that opens a connection per request and you are seeing connection errors under load, connection pooling is likely the fix.

For most schema changes — adding a column, adding an index — zero-downtime migrations are possible with the right approach. Adding a nullable column and backfilling it is safe while the application is running. Dropping a column requires a deployment that stops reading it first. Renaming a column requires an expand-contract migration across two deployments. We assess each migration individually and design the approach before executing it.