Mackenzie Morgan presented a talk at FOSDEM about dealing with a monster query that was responsible for the majority of database load. The query had a lot of OR clauses and was causing issues for a news organization during a big political event in the US. Instead of optimizing the query in the database, they refactored the opposite direction by breaking it down into four smaller queries, taking advantage of Elixir's syntax features, and using concurrency to run all four queries simultaneously. This resulted in a 20% drop in database CPU utilization, a much happier database server, and a seven times increase in the number of requests per second they could handle.