>OK I see we don't understand each other and the same test has very different results on either side which makes me think it is not reliable at all. Probably you wouldn't use this always against the sample "Employee" table. I could play with the test a bit and get much different striking results that would tell COPY TO ARRAY is slower more than 100x. ie:
>

My actual test code, which I pared down for posting, also included testing against a very large table I created for testing (over a million records). The paper noted that I got different results with a large table.

I wrote this test code back around 2001. Today, it would probably be more robust, including testing different size result sets from the large table.

Tamar