Robinhood's pganalyze-based MCP Server & AWS Deprecates Performance Insights
Hi there,
Welcome! It’s been a busy month across the Postgres ecosystem, with significant changes coming from AWS, community events, and new workflows emerging from teams building on top of pganalyze. Below you’ll find our breakdown of the AWS Performance Insights deprecation, a look at how Robinhood has built an MCP server on top of pganalyze to power AI-driven developer workflows, and the latest improvements rolling out in Query Advisor.
The Postgres for All meetup also published my talk on pg_stat_plans, a new extension we published that enables capturing Postgres plan statistics, even on busy production systems. We've had good conversations with community members on the new extension at last month's PGConf.EU in Riga, with more news to come soon, including its inclusion in official package repositories.
Also, if you'll be at AWS Re:invent this year we have a booth near Yugabyte & Atlassian in the expo hall (booth #1433). Reply to this email if you'll be there, and we can connect in person!
Behind the scenes, we've recently completed migrating pganalyze's internal query statistics storage to a new storage format based on pco. If you are a pganalyze cloud customer you will notice the faster loading times, for example when viewing Query Performance data for the last 30 days. As usual, you can find all product updates at the end of the newsletter.
All the best,
Lukas
New Blog
AWS Performance Insights Deprecation: What to Know about CloudWatch Database Insights
AWS is retiring Performance Insights for RDS and Aurora at the end of November 2025, with all customers expected to migrate to CloudWatch Database Insights by June 2026.
We’ve heard a lot of questions about what this means in practice, so this month’s article breaks down the differences: what stays the same, what disappears, how Standard vs. Advanced Mode work, and where hidden costs show up, especially when enabling CloudWatch Log exports or the paid Advanced tier.
If your team relies on AWS’ built-in monitoring or is planning a migration, this will help you understand the real impact of the deprecation and how Database Insights compares.
We're also happy to set up a conversation and product demo if you'd like to fully switch to pganalyze for a better experience with lower cost.
How Robinhood Uses MCP + pganalyze for AI-Driven Developer Workflows
Robinhood recently published a deep dive into their new MCP-powered platform for automating storage workflows across hundreds of Aurora Postgres databases.
The team at Robinhood built a custom MCP server on top of pganalyze’s statistics captured from production databases, and available through the pganalyze GraphQL API. This enables engineers to see schema and performance context directly in GitHub PR checks, reduce manual review cycles, and even troubleshoot via a Slack assistant — all without touching user data.
It’s a fascinating blueprint for how AI agents can safely augment Postgres operations in complex environments.
Query Advisor Update: Early User Feedback & New Insights Coming Soon
During Early Access, teams consistently told us Query Advisor was catching issues they didn’t realize were slowing down production. Ben from Tanda put it best: “Have already used this. So good. Query went from 60s to 140ms — an ORDER BY with LIMIT meant Postgres did a seq scan instead of using the existing indexes.”
As more teams adopt Query Advisor, we’re continuing to expand its library of anti-patterns, including new improvements around work_mem tuning and plan misestimates. We're happy to see companies adopting Query Advisor as an essential part of the toolkit for using Postgres in production.
It’s been a packed stretch of events, and we’re not done yet. We’ll be in Seattle for the PASS Data Community Summit (Nov. 17–21), including a pre-conference workshop, and then heading straight to Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent (Dec. 1–5). We’re looking forward to meeting teams thinking deeply about Postgres performance inside modern AWS workloads.
If you’ll be at re:Invent, reply to this email and let us know!
