I'll just start by warning that I'm new-ish to postgresql. I'm running 8.1 installed from source on a Debian Sarge server. I have a simple query that I believe I've placed the indexes correctly for, and I still end up with a seq scan. It makes sense, kinda, but it should be able to use the index to gather the right values. I do have a production set of data inserted into the tables, so this is running realistically: dli=# explain analyze SELECT ordered_products.product_id dli-# FROM to_ship, ordered_products dli-# WHERE to_ship.ordered_product_id = ordered_products.id AND dli-# ordered_products.paid = TRUE AND dli-# ordered_products.suspended_sub = FALSE; QUERY PLAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hash Join (cost=5126.19..31528.40 rows=20591 width=8) (actual time=6517.438..25123.115 rows=14367 loops=1) Hash Cond: ("outer".ordered_product_id = "inner".id) -> Seq Scan on to_ship (cost=0.00..11529.12 rows=611612 width=8) (actual time=393.206..15711.715 rows=611612 loops=1) -> Hash (cost=4954.79..4954.79 rows=21759 width=16) (actual time=6076.153..6076.153 rows=18042 loops=1) -> Index Scan using paid_index on ordered_products (cost=0.00..4954.79 rows=21759 width=16) (actual time=136.472..5966.275 rows=18042 loops=1) Index Cond: (paid = true) Filter: (paid AND (NOT suspended_sub)) Total runtime: 25136.190 ms (8 rows) This is running on just about the world's slowest server (with a laptop hard drive to boot), but how can I avoid the seq scan, or in general speed up this query? to_ship will have far less tuples than ordered_products, but it's still not small, as you can see.