Postgres Speed or lack thereof

Hello -

I've been lurking on this list for a little while. I have just done a
little tinkering with Postgres 6.4.2, comparing it to Oracle and mySQL on
Linux. It would appear that just doing a lot of inserts (ie 40000) in a
loop is enormously slower in Postgres in two ways that I tried it.
One - using a loop in Java that makes a JDBC call to insert.
Two- using plpgsql as a comparision to PL/SQL.

Perhaps these are bad techniques and a C based proc would do better?

I really like the idea of an open source DB and am impressed with a lot I
see about PostgreSQL - however the speed difference is pretty bad -
4.5 minutes versus about 20 seconds.

Is that just the way it goes? Are there options that would make it faster
that are not the defaults?

Any reaction would be appreciated.

John Holland