This is very interesting and well written so someone "dumb" like me can learn a lot about planning and optimisation from this. Riht in the third paragraph I just realised why some SQL query I wrote is so slow, embarassing but true, heh!
Are you just inexperienced? Don't prematurely sell yourself short. I'd read that a Rails hosting company found that 70% of their customers hadn't properly indexed their tables, and knowing's half the battle.
