After some testing using wiershark (poor mans profiler) to see what was going on with the network I found that it was the tools I've been using. Both Aqua and PGadminIII have a large overhead per column to get the meta data. MSSQL sends that data upfront so the impact isn't as bad. I'm not sure if it's a limitation of the pgsql protocol vs tds or a limitation of Aqua or a combination of both. At any rate it turns out not to be part of the problem I'm having with my software stalling out so I'm back to Square one with my problem.