I did think of something similar just loading the data tables with junk records and I may visit that idea with Josh.
I did just do some comparisons on timing of a plain select * from tbl where indexed column = x and it was considerably slower then both MSSQL and MYSQL, so I am still a bit confused. This still might be configuration issue (I ran on my 2gig desktop and the 8 gig Linux box comparisons were all ran on the same machines as far MSSQL, MYSQL, and Postgres. I turned off postgres when running MYSQL and turned off MYSQL when running postgres, MSSQL had one of the two running while I tested it.
For the 360,000 records returned MYSQL did it in 40 seconds first run and 17 seconds second run.
MSSQL did it in 56 seconds first run and 16 seconds second run.
Postgres was on the second run Total query runtime: 17109 ms. Data retrieval runtime: 72188 ms. 331640 rows retrieved.
Beware!
From the data, I can see that you're probably using pgAdmin3.
The time to execute your query including transfer of all data to the client is 17s in this example, while displaying it (i.e. pure GUI and memory alloc stuff) takes 72s. Execute to a file to avoid this.
Regards, Andreas
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