I have been comparing MySQL with MonetDB. Obviously, queries that took minutes in MySQL got executed in a matter of few seconds in Monet. 

However, I found a real blockade with joins. 

I have 2 tables - each with 150 columns. Among these (150+150) columns, around 60 are CHARACTER LARGE OBJECT type. Both the tables are populated with around 50,000 rows - with data in all the 150 columns. The average length of data in a CLOB type column is 9,000 (varying from 2 characters to 20,000 characters). The primary key of both the tables have same values and the join is always based on the primary key. The rows are by default inserted in ascending order on the primary key.

When I ran an inner join query on these two tables with about 5 criteria and with limit 1000, Monet processed this query in 5 seconds, which is completely impressive compared to MySQL's (19 seconds). 

But when I ran the same query with same criteria and limits using a left or right joins, Monet took around 5 minutes, which is clearly way behind MySQL's (just 22 seconds). 

Having read a lot about Monet's blinding speed compared to traditional relation row based DBs, I could feel that I am missing something, but couldn't figure out what. 

P.S.: I am running Monet on Macbook Pro - 2.3 GHz Core i7 - Quad core processor with 8 GB RAM.