Ken,
Actually, your problem isn't that generic, and might be better solved by
dissecting an EXPLAIN ANALYZE.
> 1. Should I just change beg to change the requirements so that I can make
> more specific queries and more screens to access those?
This is always good.
> 2. Can you
> recommend ways so that postgres acts on big tables more efficiently? I'm
> not really interested in this specific case (I just made it up). I'm more
> interested in general solutions to this general problem of big table sizes
> with bad filters and where join orders don't seem to help much.
Well, you appear to be using ORDER BY ... LIMIT. Is there a corresponding
index on the order by criteria?
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco