What Is Planner?
The planner is PostgreSQL’s component that determines the most efficient way to execute SQL queries. It evaluates possible paths based on cost, statistics, and index availability. It's essential for understanding and tuning query performance.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, Planner affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Planner changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.
Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.
Example
Tool: EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS)