Ideally, you would be absolutely right and I would not disagree with you. But I strongly do, based on many years of experience in the field. Out of all the cus

Ideally, you would be absolutely right and I would not disagree with you. But I strongly do, based on many years of experience in the field. Out of all the customers we help with their Postgres infrastructure, and that includes several $B companies, I have found none to have either: * Dev environments dimensioned similarly to production. Actually, this typically neither happens on staging and sometimes not even in QA. * All except QA, if any, have the same data as production. So in practical terms, I haven't seen it is possible to troubleshoot on dev/test/staging/QA environments, least to have a copy of the full database. This is reasonable, too: how all developers may have 5TB of data on their laptops? (leaving aside all privacy and data protection considerations). That's why having a tool, Joe, to light provision production-like environments, that are disposable, where you can troubleshoot your queries, is for me a very nice approach to this problem, and the one I recommend.