neondatabase/postgres-skills is a collection of instructions and resources that help coding agents work correctly with PostgreSQL databases. Developers use it for schema design, indexing, query optimization, and avoiding common production mistakes across different Postgres providers. The catalogue contains these Postgres-focused skills and related plugin components.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/neondatabase/postgres-skills/postgres-best-practicesnpx skills add neondatabase/postgres-skills --skill postgres-best-practicesgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/neondatabase/postgres-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/neondatabase/postgres-skills/postgres-best-practices)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neondatabase/postgres-skills/postgres-best-practices"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neondatabase/postgres-skills/postgres-best-practices.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00052 | $0.00691 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00026 | $0.00345 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00138 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00069 |
Grade A, and why
postgres-best-practices scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 43 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Postgres Best Practices
Guidelines and best practices for working with Postgres, covering schema design, indexing, query optimization, and common pitfalls.
Supported Versions
This skill covers PostgreSQL 14 through 18. Version-specific features are tagged (e.g., [PG15+], [PG18+]); environment-dependent examples identify required privileges, extensions, or multi-node setup.
PostgreSQL provides 5 years of support per major version. Always run the latest minor release.
| Version | Initial Release | End of Life |
|---|---|---|
| 18 | September 2025 | November 2030 |
| 17 | September 2024 | November 2029 |
| 16 | September 2023 | November 2028 |
| 15 | October 2022 | November 2027 |
| 14 | September 2021 | November 2026 |
Source: postgresql.org/support/versioning
References
| Area | Resource | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| Schema Design | references/schema-design.md |
Designing tables, choosing data types, normalizing, partitioning |
| Indexing | references/indexing.md |
Choosing index types, composite indexes, partial/covering indexes |
| Query Optimization | references/query-optimization.md |
Reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE, fixing bottlenecks, planner tuning |
| Query Patterns | references/query-patterns.md |
CTEs, window functions, lateral joins, UPSERT, JSONB, anti-patterns |
| Performance Diagnostics | references/performance-diagnostics.md |
pg_stat views, lock analysis, VACUUM, connection management |
| Logical Replication | references/logical-replication.md |
Pub/sub replication, live migrations, CDC |
| Hot Standby | references/hot-standby.md |
Streaming replication, read replicas, failover |
| Transaction Isolation | references/transaction-isolation.md |
Isolation levels, lost updates, serialization failures, retry logic |
| Backup & Restore | references/backup-restore.md |
pg_dump/pg_restore, pg_basebackup, PITR, recovery |
| Security & Roles | references/security-roles.md |
Privileges, RLS, pg_hba.conf, authentication, SSL |
| Bulk Data Loading | references/bulk-loading.md |
COPY patterns, ETL staging, optimizing large loads, batch ops |
| Connection Pooling | references/connection-pooling.md |
PgBouncer config, pool modes, prepared statements, sizing |
| Major Version Upgrades | references/major-version-upgrades.md |
pg_upgrade, logical replication migration, pre/post checklists |
What ships with it
13 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
- references/backup-restore.md 12 KB
- references/bulk-loading.md 8.7 KB
- references/connection-pooling.md 9.2 KB
- references/hot-standby.md 7.2 KB
- references/indexing.md 10 KB
- references/logical-replication.md 17 KB
- references/major-version-upgrades.md 10 KB
- references/performance-diagnostics.md 16 KB
- references/query-optimization.md 11 KB
- references/query-patterns.md 13 KB
- references/schema-design.md 11 KB
- references/security-roles.md 15 KB
- references/transaction-isolation.md 13 KB
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 6d ago First seen · 43 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A ade0096e963f
postgres-best-practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository neondatabase/postgres-skills (29 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 691 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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