Re: Database slowness -- my design, hardware, or both?

>  Well, I've tried to do massive UPDATEs as much as possible.  But the
> patterns that we're looking for are basically of the variety, "If the user
> clicks on X and then clicks on Y, but without Z between the two of them, and
> if these are all part of the same simulation run, then we tag action X as
> being of interest to us."  So it's oodles of keeping track of back-and-forth
> for each of the rows in the table, and looking forward and backward in the
> table.
>
>  I agree that row-at-a-time thinking isn't the best way to work, but I
> didn't see a good alternative for our purposes.  I'm open to any and all
> suggestions.

Can you post at least some table schemas, indexes, queries, and
explain output?  I think of database optimization as a serious case of
devil in the details, and generalities (like -- make sure you index,
make sure your indexes help using explain, avoid row-at-a-time
thinking) won't get you far. So if we had something concrete to work
with, well, we would have something concrete to work with.