DB tuning using pgstatspack
If you have ever engaged in performance tuning in one of the newer Oracle versions, maybe you have met the legendary statspack (see Oracle Statspack Survival Guide), or its successor Automatic Workload Repository (AWR), whose main principle lies in creating "snapshots" of important internal values (number of queries, transactions, disk reads, cache reads, etc) and consequent analysis of differences between snapshots. It is not widely known that there is a similar tool for PostgreSQL called pgstatspack, which references to Statspack even by its name - it is based on the very same principle (analysis of snapshot differences), and although it is more simple, it may provide invaluable services when tuning performance.
