There are people := {a,b} for a ≠ b IN (SELECT people FROM world): Those who understand SQL, and those who have to wait.

Couldn't resist. ;->

I just pushed a view on an Oracle Database from 464 seconds down to 3 seconds (~ 157x speedup or 0.0065% of the original execution time) by removing a few pointless ORDER BYs and replacing one expensive JOIN with subqueries.