this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Programming
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Without knowledge about your schema, I don't know enough to answer this. However, the database doesn't need to scan all rows in a table to check if a value exists if you can build an index on the relevant columns. If your products have some unique ID (or tuple of columns), then you can usually build an index on those values, which means the DB builds what is basically a lookup table for those indexed columns.
Without going into too much detail, you can think of an index as a way for a DB to make a "contains" (or "retrieve") operation drop from O(n) (check all rows) to some much faster speed like O(log n) for example. The tradeoff is that you need more space for the index now.
This comes with an added benefit that uniqueness constraints can be easily enforced on indexed columns if needed. And yes, your PK is indexed by default.
Read more about index in Postgres's docs. It actually has pretty readable documentation from my experience. Or read a book on indexes, or a video, etc. The concept is universal.
This highly depends on your needs. I'll link PG's docs on replication though.
If you're migrating right now, I wouldn't think about this too much. Replicas basically are duplicates of your database hosted on different servers (ideally in different warehouses, or even different regions if possible). Replicas work together to stay in sync, but depending on the kind of replica and the kind of query, any replica may be able to handle an incoming query (rather than a single central database).
If all you need are backups though, then replicas could be overkill. Either way, you definitely don't want prod data all stored in a single machine, usually. I would talk to your management about backup requirements and potentially availability/uptime requirements.