>>> Farhan Husain <russoue(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Thanks a lot Scott! I think that was the problem. I just changed the
> default statistics target to 50 and ran explain. The plan changed
> and I ran explain analyze. Now it takes a fraction of a second!
Yeah, the default of 10 has been too low. In 8.4 it is being raised
to 100.
> Thanks to all of you who wanted to help me. I would be happy if
> someone does me one last favor. I want to know how these query plans
> are generated and how the parameters you suggested to change affects
> it. If there is any article, paper or book on it please give me the
> name or url.
In terms of tuning in general, you might start with these:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/runtime-config-query.html
To understand the mechanics of the optimizer you might be best off
downloading the source code and reading through the README files and
comments in the source code.
-Kevin