Hallo all During a performance tuning session I had a complex query that gives some form of ranking. The "correct" way to solve this, is the use of a scalar subquery that provides the rank (or use "dense_rank over" in oracle). But in my case the query is much too slow in this special case. Even with small number of records that fit into memory (no IO). So I'am searching for a faster solution and tried also to use temporary sequences to achieve the same effect. Example 1: DROP SEQUENCE IF EXISTS s; CREATE TEMPORARY SEQUENCE s; SELECT nextval('s'), t.name FROM ( SELECT tablename AS name FROM pg_tables ORDER BY tablename ) AS t; gives: 1 pg_aggregate 2 pg_am 3 pg_amop 4 pg_amproc 5 pg_attrdef 6 pg_attribute 7 pg_auth_members But if this query is combined with a simple extension it does not work as expected. DROP SEQUENCE IF EXISTS s; CREATE TEMPORARY SEQUENCE s; SELECT nextval('s'), t.name FROM ( SELECT tablename AS name FROM pg_tables ORDER BY tablename ) AS t WHERE t.name = 'pg_am' ; The result is: 1 pg_am instead of: 2 pg_am At least for me this is surprising! Any hints? Or do I miss something obvious? thanks a lot, richard ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly