Hello, My database has grown far faster then expected and a query which used to run acceptably now does not. I'm trying to figure out a way to make this operate faster and scale better. I'm very open to the idea that this does not need to be done using a SQL query at all - right now I'm really just in need of some conceptual/architectural help on this one. So I have two tables: Table "category" Column | Type | Modifiers --------------+-------------------+----------- head_title | character varying | cat_title | character varying | subcat_title | character varying | category | ltree | Table "test" Column | Type | Modifiers --------------------+-------------------------- +----------------------------------------------------------------- id | integer | not null default nextval('master.test_id_seq'::text) category | ltree[] | ... there are other fields in the test table, but these are really the only two relevant to this. The query I want to run against these two tables is something like this: SELECT count(*) as count, category.category, nlevel(category.category) AS level, subpath(category.category,0,nlevel(category.category)-1) as parent, category.head_title, category.cat_title, category.subcat_title FROM test, category WHERE test.category <@ category.category GROUP BY category.category, category.head_title, category.cat_title, category.subcat_title | Many times the "WHERE" clause will contain additional search criteria on the 'test' table. What I am trying to get is a count of how many rows from the test table fall into each category, being limited by the search criteria. This query is starting to take an enormous amount of time (30+ seconds) and I really need the results of this in a couple seconds tops. I can do a "select category from test" and it completes in about .5 seconds. The category table currently only has 225 rows, the test table having approximately 30,000. "SELECT count(category,category FROM test GROUP BY category" is quite slow and I thought of making a materialized view of this, but then of course I don't see any way to make that result limited by my search criteria. I am completely open to re-architecting this entirely, performance of this query is critical to my application - I really just am not sure where to start. It seems like everything I do is worse then what I started with. ... It *almost* seems as if I need to build some sort of "search engine like" tool which performs all the queries against the database, has tons of memory, and cache the category attributes for each record in memory. This sure seems like a lot of work though - I sincerely hope there is an easier way..... Thanks for your help, as always! - Greg ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings