Jacob Jackson takes on a unique challenge:
Everyone is always wondering how to make Postgres faster, more efficient, etc, but nobody ever thinks about how to make Postgres slower. Now, of course, most of those people are being paid to focus on speed, but I am not (although, if you wanted to change that, let me know). As I was writing a slightly more useful guide, I decided someone needed to try to create a Postgres configuration optimized to process queries as slowly as possible. Why? I am not sure, but this is what came of that thought.
I spent a few moments thinking about an equivalent sort of torture test on SQL Server, doing things like forcing CPU affinity through one core, monkeying with cost threshold for parallelism, and using trace flags to turn off different join optimizations (like, say, hash matches and merge joins, forcing everything to be nested loops). It’s a fun thought experiment.