That's fine for a system like access or DBASE, but you should never be making queries that large for a production application. Access or DBASE or any other local FILE based system will not have any problems bringing back 1 million records because it does not have to bring the records across the wire via TCP/IP.
You should alway limit queries by a date range or at least implement a paging system. 250,000 to 1 million rows is also going to suck up a huge amount of system memory on the client side.
It does not seem like you are really catching on to the concept of a client/server based system. It does not matter if there is a billion rows because you should NEVER be letting a end user bring back the full amount anyway. Think about it.
Postgresql is not a local file based system like Access or Dbase, you can't use the same testing methods or you will be in for a world of hurt.
You give me valuable insight into the inner workings of such software. I am a firm believer in testing everything with very large files. One might spend months developing something, and have it in production for a year, and not realize what will happen when their files (tables) grow to several million records (rows). And it take so little effort to create large test files.
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