I'm writing a web site with nodejs 0.8, express 3, jade, and a PostgreSQL 9 
database. I had wanted to use a nosql database like mongodb which seemed like a 
natural fit, but I have been asked to use postgres because we already run a 
postgres server. I've used MySQL years ago but hadn't used postgres and am now 
learning about its capabilities.

For a particular page, I need to pull a lot of little bits of information from 
the database: the document itself; information about all the tags applied to 
the document; information about all of the document's authors; information 
about all of the licenses under which the document is available; information 
about a few different types of related documents. At the moment I'm using a 
single complicated query which uses views, common table expressions, 
sub-selects, array columns... It works, and is fast on my development machine, 
but I'm unsure if it's the best strategy or how it will perform under load. 
Particularly, I'm worried that as I want to add even more information to the 
page, statements like this will become slower and also more difficult for other 
fellow developers to understand. I'm already having to use some constructs that 
seem weird to me, like "SELECT array_to_json(ARRAY(SELECT ...)) ...", and then 
some post-processing in JavaScript to put the final result object together.

Is there any common wisdom about whether it would be better / faster / more 
efficient to instead issue several smaller queries? I did not initially use 
that strategy because I thought it would be best to minimize the number of 
queries to avoid unnecessary overhead associated with each query, but now that 
I think about it, with node I would be issuing all of the queries at the about 
same time, and as the results from the simpler queries come in, I could already 
begin processing them, instead of having to wait for the whole result. And if 
the database server is multicore then wouldn't several smaller queries put 
those cores to better use?

I guess I'm looking for real world anecdotes and experience from others who 
have already built node apps using SQL databases. Thanks and happy holidays.


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