Well last evening (did not try it this morning) it was taking the extra time.
I have made some adjustments to the config file per a few web sites that you all recommended my looking at.
The crucial one I'd say is the performance guide at: http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/index.php The first half-dozen settings are the crucial ones.
It is now using 137 of 756 meg avail. it is now taking 8 secs to return 22,000 rows (using pgadminIII in a sql edit window).
That might be too much RAM. Don't forget PG likes to work with your operating-system (unlike many other DBs). Make sure Windows is using enough RAM to cache diskspace.
I'm curious as to how this takes 8secs whereas you had 1 second earlier. Are you sure some of this isn't pgadmin's overhead to display the rows?
The EXPLAIN ANALYSE still shows the same as below, but the table has 344,000 recs of which only 22636 are clientnum = 'SAKS'
That sounds like it's about the borderline between using an index and not (depending on cache-size, disk speeds etc).
I am still doing a seq search (this applies to the view question where if it is a small result set it used a index search but on a larger return set it did a seq search) in my view, but with the adjustments to the kernel I get a result in 140 secs (MSSQL was 135 secs).
If you want to check whether the index would help, try issuing the following before running your query:
SET ENABLE_SEQSCAN=FALSE;
This will force PG to use any index it can regardless of whether it thinks it will help.
This is not production, I am still very worried that I have to do all this tweeking to use this, MSSQL worked out of the box as it does (not saying its great, but I never had to adjust a kernel setting etc). Since we cannot afford the 70,000 dollars they want to license it I am not implying I can use MSSQL, but I could look at other DB's like MYSQL, or Firebird, etc.
I'm a little curious what kernel settings you are changing on Windows. I wasn't aware there was much to be done there.
I'm afraid you do have to change half a dozen settings in postgresql.conf to match your workload, but PG runs on a much wider range of machines than MSSQL so it's difficult to come up with a "reasonable" default. Takes me about 5 minutes when I setup an installation to make sure the figures are reasonable (rather than the best they can be).
I have a lot of time now (two weeks) in this conversion and do not wish to give up, I will see if I can learn what is needed to get the maximum performance. I have seen much information available and this list has been a huge resource. I really appreciate all the help.
-- Richard Huxton Archonet Ltd
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