18,273,008 rows in observationresults pg_stats: select * from pg_stats where tablename='observationresults' and attname='batteryidentifier'; schemaname | tablename | attname | null_frac | avg_width | n_distinct | most_common_vals | most_common_freqs | histogram_bounds | correlation ------------+--------------------+-------------------+-----------+------ -----+------------+----------------------------------------------------- ---------------------+-------------------------------------------------- -----------------------+------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------+------------- public | observationresults | batteryidentifier | 0 | 4 | 12942 | {437255,1588952,120420,293685,356599,504069,589910,693683,834990,854693} | {0.00133333,0.00133333,0.001,0.001,0.001,0.001,0.001,0.001,0.001,0.001} | {3561,271263,556929,839038,1125682,1406538,1697589,1970463,2226781,25392 41,2810844} | 0.31779 thanks Tim Jones Healthcare Project Manager Optio Software, Inc. (770) 576-3555 -----Original Message----- From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 6:25 PM To: Tim Jones Cc: pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [PERFORM] strange query behavior The large rowcount estimate makes it back off to a non-nestloop plan for the outer joins, and in this situation that's a loser. I'm actually not sure why they're not both too high --- with the rowcount estimate of 1362 for the inner scan in the first example, you'd expect about twice that for the join result. But the immediate problem is that in the case where it knows exactly what batteryidentifier is being probed for, it's still off by more than a factor of 100 on the rowcount estimate for observationresults. How many rows in observationresults, and may we see the pg_stats entry for observationresults.batteryidentifier? It's likely that the answer for you will be "raise the statistics target for observationresults and re-ANALYZE", but I'd like to gather more info about what's going wrong first. regards, tom lane