At Bytebase we work with PostgreSQL every day, both inside our own product and across the databases our customers point us at. The same handful of mistakes shows up over and over, and almost none of them are exotic. They are small things an application developer controls and skips anyway.
So this is not a database administration checklist. These are the five things I wish every app developer turned on by default. Each takes minutes, and each one buys you something concrete: a connection you can actually debug, a query that fails fast instead of hanging, a deploy that doesn't lock prod. Do them and your DBA stops paging you at 2am. There's a bonus index trick at the end.
1. Set application_name for Better Debugging
This is the cheapest win on the list, and the one people skip most. By default every connection from your fleet looks identical. When something melts down and you're staring at a wall of pg_stat_activity rows, all the same user from the same pooler IP, you have no idea which service is the culprit. application_name is a free label. Set it once per service and the noise turns into a name.
How to Implement
