select count(*) filter (where year <= 1945) as pre1945, count(*) filter (where year between 1946 and 1964) as period2, count(*) filter (where year between 1965 and 1974) as period3, ... from ... where ...;

Writing json_populate_record in the FROM clause is good practice, since all of the extracted columns are available for use without duplicate function calls.

Post.in_order_of(:type, %w[Draft Published Archived]).order(:created_at).pluck(:name) which generates SELECT posts.name FROM posts ORDER BY CASE posts.type WHEN 'Draft' THEN 1 WHEN 'Published' THEN 2 WHEN 'Archived' THEN 3 ELSE 4 END ASC, posts.created_at ASC

SELECT * FROM ( -- build virtual table of all hours between -- a date range SELECT start_ts, start_ts + interval '1 hour' AS end_ts FROM generate_series( '2017-03-01'::date, '2017-03-03'::timestamp - interval '1 hour', interval '1 hour' ) AS t(start_ts) ) AS cal LEFT JOIN ( -- build virtual table of uptimes SELECT * FROM ( VALUES ('2017-03-01 01:15:00-06'::timestamp, '2017-03-01 02:15:00-06'::timestamp), ('2017-03-01 08:00:00-06', '2017-03-01 20:00:00-06'), ('2017-03-02 19:00:00-06', null) ) AS t(start_ts, end_ts) ) AS uptime ON cal.end_ts > uptime.start_ts AND cal.start_ts <= coalesce(uptime.end_ts, current_timestamp)

FROM test x1 LEFT JOIN test x2 ON x1.id = (x2.data->>'parent')::INT;

Joins are not expensive. Who said it to you? As basically the whole concept of relational databases revolve around joins (from a practical point of view), these product are very good at joining. The normal way of thinking is starting with properly normalized structures and going into fancy denormalizations and similar stuff when the performance really needs it on the reading side. JSON(B) and hstore (and EAV) are good for data with unknown structure.

The SELECT part should not contain any columns not referenced in GROUP BY clause, unless it is wrapped with an aggregate function.

Before SQL3 (1999), the selected fields must appear in the GROUP BY clause

Event.joins(:packages).having('array_agg(packages.type) @> array[?]', packages).group(:id)

Which to use? ANY is a later, more versatile addition, it can be combined with any binary operator returning a boolean value. IN burns down to a special case of ANY. In fact, its second form is rewritten internally: IN is rewritten with = ANY NOT IN is rewritten with <> ALL