I am runing postgres 7.4. I don't see much on the Postgres site about performance improvements, except for the somewhat vague statement "This release has a more intelligent buffer replacement strategy, which will make better use of available shared buffers and improve performance.".

The situation (on my development box) is one of *SEVERE* disk thrashing. Just doing a "select count(category),category from data" and I can hear the disk drive sounding like it is going to take off.

While I agree that Postgres can summarize rows faster then I could ever hope to, it lacks the sophisticated cache configurations that are possible with other RDBMS (notably Sybase or Informix, which if I could use either of those here could probably make this problem a non-issue).

That being said, I will give upgrading Postgres a shot, but I am not optimistic as it still relies on the operating system to cache files and thus there is no way to ensure certain tables have a higher caching priority.


- dEvNuL