Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Tom, would that help the planner make better choices for this kind of > query? I think the problem was that he had select ... from a, b full join c on ... where ... where table b is big and you only need a few rows from it, so it really needs to be joined last, but the above forced doing it first. It wasn't clear to me why he wanted the full join at all (in fact, you could see from the plan that the planner had been able to reduce it to a left join because there were WHERE clauses that'd discard one set of null-extended rows anyway). Without knowing that, it's hard to say whether there's another way to get what he wants. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq