You can do "SHOW random_page_cost" yourself right now, too.
4
I also tried "SHOW seq_page_cost" and that's 1.
Looking at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config-query.html#GUC-RANDOM-PAGE-COST I wonder if I should try reducing random_page_cost?
Something that might help when it comes to advice on performance tuning is that this database is used only for analytics. It's essentially a partial replication of a production (document-oriented) database. So a lot of normal operations that might employ a series of sequential fetches may not actually be the norm in my case. Rather, I'm doing a lot of counts on data that is typically randomly distributed.
Thanks,
-Alessandro
