Deep dive into how RLS policies interact with the PostgreSQL query planner — covering policy inlining, why naive RLS destroys index usage, how to write policies that the planner can push down efficiently, and the specific index patterns (partial indexes on tenant_id, expression indexes on current_setting()) that recover seq-scan performance losses in multi-tenant SaaS schemas
title: "PostgreSQL Row-Level Security Without the Performance Tax"
published: true
description: "RLS silently converts index scans to seq scans in multi-tenant Postgres. Here's the planner behavior and the policy patterns that recover performance."
tags: postgresql, performance, architecture, security
canonical_url: https://mvpfactory.co/blog/postgresql-rls-performance
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