Any way to *not* use server-side prepared statements in Postgresql?

You need to add

prepareThreshold=0

parameter to the JDBC driver connection URL something like this:

jdbc:postgresql://db.address/dbName?prepareThreshold=0

see also https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgjdbc/issues/130 it helped me a lot to solve a strange behavior of the driver

The JDBC driver documentation contains the gory details of when and how server-side prepared statements are used.

Anyway, the log output you show isn't indicative of a problem, because any query will be parsed, bound, and executed. The JDBC driver just chooses to execute those steps as separate protocol steps rather than one step like the Python driver does. (I suppose you could argue network overhead, though.) The issue most people are concerned about with respect to prepared statements is that parameters are substituted after planning, but that's not what is happening here, because <unnamed> prepared statements are planned after the bind step (unlike named prepared statements, which are planned after the parse step). You can read up on those details in the protocol documentation.

Firstly, under the hood, every db uses prepared statements, even if created on the fly and immediately thrown away.

Secondly, you shouldn't be afraid of prepared statements. They offer a huge performance boost: Once created they can be reused with different parameters, but all the parsing, user authorization checking, query plan and optimization is calculated once and stored with the prepared statement.

If you're going to be executing the same sql over and over, create a prepared statement, keep a reference to it, and reuse it - providing different parameters for each invocation.

Here's some sample code to give you an idea of how to use them:

private PreparedStatement preparedStatement;

public ResultSet getAccount(String id) throws SQLException {
    // Do this once
    if (preparedStatement == null)
        preparedStatement = conn.prepareStatement("select * from account where id = ?");

    // Do this many times
    preparedStatement.setString(1, id);
    return preparedStatement.executeQuery();
}

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    ResultSet rs = new MyClass().getAccount("00100000006ONCrAAO");
}