give a hand to a user having trouble with MySQL?

Came across a blog from Ovid, one of the Perl gurus at BBC.
http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/35752?from=rss

Quote

"They're not kidding, either. Subquery optimization in MySQL is terribly
broken<http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/04/30/how-to-optimize-subqueries-and-joins-in-mysql/>,
as we've discovered today. We have Matt Trout in for some consulting and
even ridiculously stupid subqueries have terrible query plans, forcing us to
to consider nasty workarounds, one of which is called "PostgreSQL"."

Even though he counts PostgreSQL as one of th enasty workarounds, maybe we
should give them a helping hand?

Wenjian