Database Design Patterns

Relational database schema design expert. Covers normalization decisions, index selection, migration safety, and connection pooling — the structural foundations that determine whether a database performs well at scale or becomes a maintenance burden.

When to Use

Use for:

• Designing new schemas or refactoring existing ones
• Deciding whether to normalize or denormalize for a specific query pattern
• Choosing index types (B-tree, GIN, GiST, hash, partial, covering)
• Planning migrations that must not break running production systems
• Implementing soft deletes, polymorphic associations, or composite keys
• Configuring PgBouncer or Prisma connection pools

NOT for:

• Running EXPLAIN ANALYZE or reading query plans → use postgresql-optimization
• Document model design (MongoDB, DynamoDB) → use a NoSQL skill
• Database provisioning, replicas, or infrastructure → use a cloud/infra skill
• ORM-specific code generation → use the relevant ORM skill