Back in the 7.4 era, to make leading substrings be indexed, I had to set locale=C. See thread: <http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2005-02/msg00159.php> I couldn't find any updates to this issue in the archives since then. With 8.1.3, the default locale for my system is en_US.UTF8. Leading substring searches result in a sequential search instead of an indexed search. Do I still have to initdb to locale=C, or is there a better option now? Wes