Mike,
> I think it is also possible that Microsoft has more programmers working
> on tuning issues for SQL Server than PostgreSQL has working on the
> whole project.
Ah, but quantity != quality. Or they wouldn't be trolling our mailing lists
trying to hire PostgreSQL programmers for the SQL Server project (really!).
And we had nearly 200 contributors between 7.3 and 7.4 ... a respectable
development staff for even a large corporation.
Point taken, though, SQL Server has done a better job in opitimizing for
"dumb" queries. This is something that PostgreSQL needs to work on, as is
self-referential updates for large tables, which also tend to be really slow.
Mind you, in SQL Server 7 I used to be able to crash the server with a big
self-referential update, so this is a common database problem.
Unfortunately, these days only Tom and Neil seem to be seriously working on
the query planner (beg pardon in advance if I've missed someone) so I think
the real answer is that we need another person interested in this kind of
optimization before it's going to get much better.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco