Why Most Turkish Startups are Misusing PostgreSQL

Over the last few years, I’ve had the chance to look under the hood of several early-stage startups in Turkiye.

Why Most Turkish Startups are Misusing PostgreSQL

Over the last few years, I’ve had the chance to look under the hood of several early-stage startups in Turkiye.

The industries vary. The teams are different. The funding stages range from seed to Series A. Yet, I keep seeing the exact same pattern: A beautiful frontend, a product with real potential, and a PostgreSQL database quietly screaming for help in the background.

The scary part? Most teams have no idea.

This isn’t about a lack of talent. Turkish engineers are incredibly capable. This is about incentives, habits, and the unique pressures of our startup ecosystem. Here is the reality of what’s happening.

1. The Auto-Index Delusion

Most startups rely entirely on primary keys and whatever automatic indexes their ORM generates. That’s not a strategy — that’s a prayer.

PostgreSQL doesn’t magically optimize queries just because an index exists somewhere. I constantly see queries filtering by user_id and status while ordering by created_at, yet only single-column indexes exist. Without a properly designed composite index that actually matches the access pattern, Postgres is forced to scan far more rows than it should.

The result: A query that should take 5ms starts taking 500ms. Nobody notices until the traffic spikes, at which point the team calls it a scaling issue. It’s not a scaling issue. It’s an indexing issue.

2. Blind Trust in ORMs

ORMs are fantastic productivity tools, but in many local startups, they’ve become a black box that no one dares to question.

I rarely see teams running EXPLAIN ANALYZE as part of their workflow. Query plans are almost never reviewed. N+1 problems are rampant, and massive joins are generated automatically without a second thought. Because the backend works, performance is assumed to be fine.

When things finally slow down, the reaction isn’t to optimize the query — it’s architectural: We need to move to microservices. Which leads us to the next trap.

3. Premature Microservices

I’ve seen startups with fewer than 50k daily users running six different microservices — all hitting the same, poorly optimized PostgreSQL instance.

You’ve got the auth-service, payment-service, and order-service all competing for the same bottleneck. Database optimization isn’t glamorous. It doesn't look as cool as a complex distributed systems diagram. But splitting a slow system into five pieces doesn’t make it faster; it just distributes the pain.

4. Flying Blind (Zero Observability)

In most cases:

pg_stat_statements is disabled.
Slow query logging is turned off.
There are no performance dashboards or query time budgets.

This means teams don’t actually know which queries are slow; they just feel that the system is getting heavier. Postgres has world-class introspection tools built-in, but if you don’t turn them on, you’re flying a plane in the dark without a radar.

The Real Root of the Problem

This isn’t an engineering failure; it’s an ecosystem dynamic. Turkish startups are under intense pressure to ship fast, show traction, and impress investors. Database performance doesn’t show up in a pitch deck. Senior DBAs are rare and expensive. Optimization is perpetually postponed because it works for now.

Until it doesn’t.

The Fix-It Checklist

If I could give a simple checklist to any early-stage founder or CTO, it would be this:

Design composite indexes intentionally. Don’t just index everything.
Make EXPLAIN ANALYZE a habit. Make it part of your weekly code reviews.
Enable pg_stat_statements from day one. Knowledge is power.
Define a query time budget. (e.g., No API-facing query should exceed 50ms.)
Treat DB performance as a feature. It’s just as important as your UI.

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful tools in the world, but power without deliberate usage leads to fragility. The good news? This is completely fixable. The teams that stop chasing hype-driven architecture and start focusing on their data foundations will be the ones left standing when the real growth arrives.