Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:03:03 -0300
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
To: Luke Lonergan <llonergan@greenplum.com>
Cc: Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>, Chad Wagner <chad.wagner@gmail.com>,
	Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Igor Lobanov <ilobanov@swsoft.com>, Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com>,
	pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Querying distinct values from a large table
Message-ID: <20070130210303.GA2178@alvh.no-ip.org>
Mail-Followup-To: Luke Lonergan <llonergan@greenplum.com>,
	Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>,
	Chad Wagner <chad.wagner@gmail.com>,
	Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Igor Lobanov <ilobanov@swsoft.com>,
	Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com>, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
References: <20070130170443.GJ2303@alvh.no-ip.org>
	<C1E4CC6C.19A2C%llonergan@greenplum.com>
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Luke Lonergan wrote:
> Alvaro,
> 
> On 1/30/07 9:04 AM, "Alvaro Herrera" <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> 
> >> (Incidentally I'm not sure where 2-5x comes from. It's entirely dependant on
> >> your data distribution. It's not hard to come up with distributions where
> >> it's
> >> 1000x as fast and others where there's no speed difference.)
> > 
> > So the figure is really "1-1000x"?  I bet this one is more impressive in
> > PHB terms.
> 
> You got me - I'll bite - what's PHB?

Pointy-Haired Boss, a term (AFAIK) popularized by the Dilbert comic strip.

Why, I just noticed there's even a Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy_Haired_Boss
It seems people enjoy writing hypothetically about their bosses.

-- 
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.