So his comment is more along the lines of, "I was using a screwdriver to pound in this nail and it was taking forever, but then I started using a hammer and man...it went fast!"
Hi - MapD creator - I love Postgres/PostGIS and use them all the time - there are just some things that are going to execute fast in parallel with high-memory bandwidth. And then there is the algorithm - see my post above for an explanation.