Self-service reporting
Report requests to engineering fell by about 30%, as stakeholders built the simpler reports themselves in a configurable tool I built with Claude Code.
Next case studyFaster database, lower cost
Archiving and optimising a legacy PostgreSQL database cut storage by 80% and average query latency by 74%. I set the approach and directed a senior engineer, who investigated and implemented it.
- Role
- Set the approach and directed the work
- Client
- A business-messaging platform
- Scope
- The legacy PostgreSQL database behind the campaign platform
- Measurement
- Measured before and after
01
The problem
A business-messaging platform ran its campaign platform on a legacy PostgreSQL database. Heavy reporting queries were slow, and one client’s contacts page took 84 seconds to load.
02
What I did
I set the approach (archiving and optimising the database) and directed a senior engineer, who investigated and implemented it. Before any change, I set performance and cost baselines, so the effect could be measured.
Measured against those baselines, storage fell by 80% and average query latency by 74%. Heavy reporting queries ran up to 22 times faster, and the contacts page went from 84 seconds to under one second, with similar improvements on other pages.
Diagram of the database before and after the work. A tall cylinder labelled Before is archived, along an arrow, into a much shorter solid cylinder labelled After, and a dimension line marks the difference as 80% less storage.
03
Results
Measured against baselines set before the work
Storage
80% less
storage, after archiving and optimising the database.
Query latency
74% lower
average query latency, measured before and after the work.
Reporting queries
up to 22 times faster
for heavy reporting queries. One client's contacts page went from 84 seconds to under one second.
04
Stack
- PostgreSQL
- Cloud SQL
Contact
Get in touch
Tell me about your project, your team or the problem you're working on.
Or find me on LinkedIn