On 03/06/2013 06:54 AM, David Leverton wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm encountering very poor query plans when joining against a union, > where one branch of the union is itself a join: specifically, Postgres > does the entire inside join and then filters the result, rather than > pushing the filters down to the joined tables. I've provided a > standalone test case below, including some variations that don't show > the problem for comparison. The fourth query is the problematic one - > I would have expected the Append portion of the plan to be essentially > the same as the one in the second query. Thanks for the test case! Actually, in case #4, Postgres *is* pushing down the join qual into the segments of the Union. It's just that that's not helping performance any; it's causing a really slow join on bundle, which is actually where you're spending most of your time: -> Hash Join (cost=27.50..12970.50 rows=1000000 width=8) (actual time=0.617..344.127 rows=1000000 loops=1) Hash Cond: (bundle.bundle_type = bundle_contents.bundle_type) Buffers: shared hit=448 -> Seq Scan on bundle (cost=0.00..1443.00 rows=100000 width=8) (actual time=0.009..22.066 rows=100000 loops=1) Buffers: shared hit=443 -> Hash (cost=15.00..15.00 rows=1000 width=8) (actual time=0.594..0.594 rows=1000 loops=1) Buckets: 1024 Batches: 1 Memory Usage: 40kB Buffers: shared hit=5 -> Seq Scan on bundle_contents (cost=0.00..15.00 rows=1000 width=8) (actual time=0.008..0.207 rows=1000 loops=1) Buffers: shared hit=5 Clearly this is the wrong strategy; Postgres should be letting the filter on item_reference be the driver instead of hashing the whole bundle + bundle_contents join. I suspect that the qual pushdown into the union is hitting an inability to transverse multiple joins, which wouldn't surprise me; in fact, I'd be surprised if it could do so. On a pragmatic basis, joining against complex UNION expressions is liable to be a bit of a minefield for the next few generations of the Postgres planner; it's just really hard to optimize. You might think of using outer joins instead of a UNION. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance