>You can get away with good data structures/good sql queries and a little big O analysis almost everywhere. So design databases and algorithms for performance

>You can get away with good data structures/good sql queries and a little big O analysis almost everywhere. So design databases and algorithms for performance from day 1 & understand how the data needs to be structured? You'd have to verify the assumptions you made about the data were correct and profile often if you didn't want to worry about performance regressions. Bad enough regressions are a failed product and you can't ship something that could never get fast enough without a rewrite. I don't think everyone in this thread has the same concept of what optimisation means. It doesn't all have to be obfuscating bit-fiddling. Even identifying the important paths is optimisation.