Database Query Best Practices - Prevent Connection Pool Exhaustion

CRITICAL SKILL - READ THIS BEFORE QUERYING RAILWAY DATABASE

The Problem

When querying Railway production database from local development environment, you may encounter:

psycopg2.OperationalError: sorry, too many clients already

This happens when:

• Multiple local dev servers are running (npm run dev, npm run develop)
• Each dev server holds database connections open
• Connection pool limit is reached (300 total connections)
• No new connections can be established

ALWAYS Use This Approach