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Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale

SELECT DISTINCT queries can degrade PostgreSQL performance, requiring query redesign.

Steady
Signal score
33
as of 1d ago
Sources
3
agreeing on postgres
Trajectory
↓ Cooling
7-day est. ~23

Why this scored 33

every term, weighted
Velocity+0.0 / 40

Engagement gained per hour since the last capture, against the fastest item on its own source

Acceleration+11.3 / 25

Whether that velocity is itself speeding up, as a per-hour rate

Cross-source spread+16.7 / 25

How many independent communities are talking about the same entity

Recency+7.9 / 10

Decays to zero over 14 days

Saturation penalty−2.7 / 30

Subtracted once something is big and old — we rank what's next, not what's peaked

Composite33.2

Weights are hand-tuned, not learned — we're calibrating them against realized trends as history accumulates. On a topic's first sighting there's no previous reading to compare against, so acceleration starts from a neutral prior rather than a measurement, and velocity falls back to engagement over its whole lifetime until a second reading exists. Full methodology

Outlook

low confidence · estimate, not a guarantee

7-day

~23

range 0–35

14-day

~12

range 0–27

30-day

~0

range 0–19

Signal history

7-day window (free)
2337

projected trajectory (estimate, not a guarantee)

Entities

postgres
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