Aaron Turner <synfinatic(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I know the costs are just relative, but I assumed
> cost=19229.08..29478.99 isn't 5 minutes of effort even on crappy
> hardware.
Very likely the bulk of the time is spent in the DELETE work proper,
not in the query to find the rows to be deleted. In particular I wonder
if you have an unindexed foreign key referencing this table ...
regards, tom lane