On 12/01/2013, at 12:47 PM, T. E. Lawrence <t.e.lawre...@icloud.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have a pretty standard query with two tables:
> 
> SELECT table_a.id FROM table_a a, table_b b WHERE ... AND ... AND b.value=...;
> 
> With the last "AND b.value=..." the query is extremely slow (did not wait for 
> it to end, but more than a minute), because the value column is not indexed 
> (contains items longer than 8K).
> 
> However the previous conditions "WHERE ... AND ... AND" should have already 
> reduced the candidate rows to just a few (table_b contains over 50m rows). 
> And indeed, removing the last "AND b.value=..." speeds the query to just a 
> millisecond.
> 
> Is there a way to instruct PostgreSQL to do first the initial "WHERE ... AND 
> ... AND" and then the last "AND b.value=..." on the (very small) result?

Have you looked at the WITH clause [1,2]:

WITH filtered as (SELECT table_a.id, b.value as val FROM table_a a, table_b b 
WHERE … AND …)
SELECT * FROM filtered WHERE filtered.val=…

It evaluates the the first SELECT once, then applies the second SELECT to the 
first in memory (at least that's the way I think about them).

Cheers,

Tony


[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/queries-with.html
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/sql-select.html#SQL-WITH



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