I've definitely been in these types of situations, having to make things work in a hostile environment or to meet a deadline. I am just recommending an option t

I've definitely been in these types of situations, having to make things work in a hostile environment or to meet a deadline. I am just recommending an option to avoid these types of situations for those who are able to seek out the best practice before starting. I might also speculate that if you were writing analytics queries that ran scans across several, large, heavily contended production database tables, it's likely that dumping the data into a temporary table first might have been the best option even with a highly tuned server. Despite the fantasy we're often told about MVCC, there are still enormous amounts of resources wasted doing large analytics-type scans on live, hot tables. This isn't something that could be solved with a query plan hint and it's unlikely even a smarter query planner could have saved you. If I had a magic wand, my environment of choice in this situation would be a separate dedicated, read-only slave running on ZFS that would allow me to create filesystem snapshots & bring up a PostgreSQL instance on that snapshot.