First thing: What is your "work_mem" set to, and how much RAM is in the machine? If you look at the plan, you'll immediately notice the "external merge Disk" line where it spills to disk on the sort. Try setting your work_mem to 120MB or so (depending on how much RAM you have, # concurrent sessions, complexity of queries etc)
Good call, thanks, although the in-mem quicksort is not much faster:
the machine is not nailed down, but I think I'd need to find a way to drastically improve the plan to keep this in Postgres. The alternative is probably caching the results somewhere else: for any given subject, I only need the latest observation of each type 99.9+% of the time.
