PostgreSQL Debugging and Ops Queries, Organized

Every team has "that query"—the one someone runs during incidents to check for locked transactions, or to find customers affected by a bug, or to verify that a migration completed correctly. These queries usually live in someone's terminal history or a random Notion doc, and when you need them at 2am during an outage, you're scrambling to remember who wrote them. SaturnSQL turns these one-off firefighting queries into a searchable runbook your whole team can use.

The core idea is simple: ops SQL should be a team asset, not tribal knowledge. When you save a query to SaturnSQL, you can give it a descriptive name, add tags like "incident" or "postgres-health" or "customer-debug," and write notes explaining what it does and when to use it. The next time someone needs to check table bloat or find orphaned records, they can search the library instead of asking around or reinventing the query from scratch.

This is especially valuable during incidents, when stress is high and you need answers fast. Instead of trying to remember the exact syntax for checking active locks or finding long-running queries, you pull up the saved query and run it. The context is right there—what the query does, what the output means, what thresholds are concerning. And after the incident, the queries you ran and the results you got are preserved automatically, which makes post-mortems much easier to write.

Building your ops query library

Most teams start by capturing the queries they already use. Database health checks are a common starting point—things like finding queries that have been running for more than 5 minutes, checking for table bloat, identifying missing indexes on frequently-queried columns. These are the queries that senior engineers have memorized but newer team members struggle to find or write correctly.

Customer debugging queries are another good category. When support escalates an issue, you often need to quickly understand a specific customer's state—their subscription status, recent activity, any errors in their audit trail. Having these queries ready, with clear parameters for customer ID or email, means you can diagnose issues in minutes instead of spending the first 20 minutes figuring out what to query.

Data integrity checks round out most libraries. These are the queries you run periodically to make sure nothing has gone wrong—orphaned records, constraint violations, unexpected nulls in required fields. Some teams run these manually before releases; others set up scheduled jobs. Either way, having them documented and accessible means anyone on the team can run them when needed.

Common questions

Is this safe for production querying? SaturnSQL is just an editor—it doesn't have any special privileges beyond what your database credentials allow. If you connect with read-only credentials, you can only run read-only queries. We recommend using a read replica for exploratory work and being careful with write access, just as you would with any database client.

Can we keep some queries private? Yes. You can organize queries into workspaces with different access levels, so sensitive operational queries can be restricted to the people who need them. A query for checking customer payment history might be limited to the billing team, while general database health queries could be visible to all engineers.