On my machine (Laptop with Pentium-M 1.6 GHz and 512MB DDR333) I get the following timings :


Big Joins Query will all the fields and no order by (I just put a SELECT * in the first table) yielding about 6k rows :
=> 12136.338 ms


Replacing the SELECT * from the table with many fields by just a SELECT of the foreign key columns :
=> 1874.612 ms


I felt like playing a bit so I implemented a hash join in python (download the file, it works on Miroslav's data) :
All timings do not include time to fetch the data from the database. Fetching all the tables takes about 1.1 secs.


* With something that looks like the current implementation (copying tuples around) and fetching all the fields from the big table :
=> Fetching all the tables : 1.1 secs.
=> Joining : 4.3 secs


        * Fetching only the integer fields
        => Fetching all the tables : 0.4 secs.
        => Joining : 1.7 secs

* A smarter join which copies nothing and updates the rows as they are processed, adding fields :
=> Fetching all the tables : 1.1 secs.
=> Joining : 0.4 secs
With the just-in-time compiler activated, it goes down to about 0.25 seconds.


First thing, this confirms what Tom said.
It also means that doing this query in the application can be a lot faster than doing it in postgres including fetching all of the tables. There's a problem somewhere ! It should be the other way around ! The python mappings (dictionaries : { key : value } ) are optimized like crazy but they store column names for each row. And it's a dynamic script language ! Argh.


        Note : run the program like this :

python test.py |less -S

So that the time spent scrolling your terminal does not spoil the measurements.

Download test program :
http://boutiquenumerique.com/pf/miroslav/test.py

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