Netflix Prize data

I signed up for the Netflix Prize. (www.netflixprize.com) and downloaded
their data and have imported it into PostgreSQL. Here is how I created the
table:
Table "public.ratings"
Column | Type | Modifiers
--------+---------+-----------
item | integer |
client | integer |
rating | integer |
rdate | text |
Indexes:
"ratings_client" btree (client)
"ratings_item" btree (item)

markw(at)snoopy:~/netflix$ time psql netflix -c "select count(*) from ratings"
count
-----------
100480507
(1 row)

real 2m6.270s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.005s

The one thing I notice is that it is REAL slow. I know it is, in fact, 100
million records, but I don't think PostgreSQL is usually slow like this.
I'm going to check with some other machines to see if there is a problem
with my test machine or if something is wierd about PostgreSQL and large
numbers of rows.

I tried to cluster the data along a particular index but had to cancel it
after 3 hours.

I'm using 8.1.4. The "rdate" field looks something like: "2005-09-06" So,
the raw data is 23 bytes, the date string will probably be rounded up to
12 bytes, that's 24 bytes per row of data. What is the overhead per
variable? per row?

Is there any advantage to using "varchar(10)" over "text" ?