neon-postgres-egress-optimizer

Reduce Neon egress by finding queries that transfer the most data with pg_stat_statements, then fixing anti-patterns like SELECT *, missing pagination, and JOIN duplication. Select only needed columns, bound result sets with LIMIT, and cache frequently called static data.

Use the pg_stat_statements extension to rank queries by total rows returned, average rows per call, and call frequency. Queries returning many wide rows with JSONB or TEXT columns, or called extremely often, are the biggest egress contributors.

High Postgres bills usually come from the application fetching more data than it uses, not from the database itself. Common causes are unpaginated list endpoints, SELECT * pulling large JSONB columns, and aggregating raw rows in application code instead of SQL.

Yes, pg_stat_statements is available on Neon by default but may still require CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_stat_statements. Note that stats are cleared when a Neon compute scales to zero and restarts, so reset stats and measure under representative traffic.

Split a JOIN when a wide parent row is duplicated across many child rows, such as a product with a 50KB JSONB column joined to 200 reviews. Fetching parent and child in two separate queries eliminates the repeated parent data transfer.