Code Story: Optimizing Our PostgreSQL 16 Queries with EXPLAIN and Drizzle 0.30 Cut Response Time by 40%

At 2:14 PM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our production PostgreSQL 16 cluster hit a p99 query latency of 2.8 seconds for our core order lookup endpoint, triggering 12 customer support tickets in 10 minutes and costing us an estimated $4,200 in lost conversion revenue before we even noticed the alert. We