[re fail] my main goal is to find out if r17 is "generally useful" for other people doing data mining, _not_ to pull the wool over any eyes. What would you like to see done differently? I am very happy to redo the comparison...or better yet, help someone else to redo it and satisfy themselves (or not) of r17's usefulness.

[re reasonableness PostgreSQL being 20-40x slower] Yes, but only at some things. In the first bakeoff (http://www.rseventeen.com/blog/bakeoff_part_1_mysql_postgres...) PostgreSQL was clearly "better" than MySQL. And r17 can't do transactions and is useless for anything "on line", which is where PostgreSQL really shines. (As commented below) next up I'll be baking off against Hadoop, which is a more apples<->apples comparison.

[re misconfiguration] is there a specific configuration that you would prefer that I use? I'm also happy to show the EXPLAIN output if that would help.