Yeah, one of the first things I learned (Ruby 1.8) was that Ruby is slow. If you can avoid creating a bunch of Ruby objects and push the logic into the databas

Yeah, one of the first things I learned (Ruby 1.8) was that Ruby is slow. If you can avoid creating a bunch of Ruby objects and push the logic into the database you'll typically see performance gains. The big exception was Mongo, where more "advanced" features got shoved off to the JS interpreter which was an expensive operation – at least until the 'aggregation framework' became a thing. Anyways. Before blindly doing string manipulation with postgres make sure that all the locale stuff is set correctly.