Ian Dooley, Unsplash

Generating Massive Reports on a Tiny Budget – NestJS, Postgres & Streams

“How hard can it be? It’s just SELECT * FROM sales and write to a CSV.” – Me, before the server begged for mercy. I learned the hard way that generating a multi-gigabyte report on a 2-GB-RAM server is like trying to move an entire public library using a single bicycle—you need lots of small, well-balanced trips rather than one back-breaking haul. In this guide I’ll show you how to box up that data and shuttle it safely, keeping your NestJS app upright and your cloud bill slim. ...

August 3, 2025 · 5 min