On Oct 7, 2014, at 10:02 AM, Marc Mamin wrote: > Hi, > it seems to me that your subquery may deliver duplicate ids. > And with the selectivity of your example, I would expect an index usage > instead of a table scan. You may check how up to date your statistics are > and try to raise the statistic target on the column resource_2_tag.tag_id. > Also try a CTE form for your query: It shouldn't be able to deliver duplicate ids. => SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT DISTINCT id FROM resource WHERE resource_attribute1_id = 614) AS foo; count ------- 5184 => SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT id FROM resource WHERE resource_attribute1_id = 614) AS foo; count ------- 5184 However, adding in the DISTINCT drastically changed the query plan, and did give a speedup. Your comment made me focus on the notion of a Table Scan. I assumed it did the seq scan - and there would not be much savings otherwise - because the table is just 2 ids. I was wrong. I noticed that I never put a PRIMARY KEY constraint on that table. So i tried adding a PRIMARY KEY constraint, then running vacuum analyze... And that solved all my problems. the original query ended up being the fastest at 260ms ( down from 1760 ) Join - 260ms Subquery w/DISTINCT - 300ms CTE - 330 CTE w/DISTINCT - 345ms Subquery (no DISTINCT) - 1500ms -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general