I've noticed the planner is not yet smart enough to do an index scan when the left operand of a contains operator (<@) is a btree-indexed column and the right operand is a range or multirange type of the same type as the column.
For instance, given a users table with an id int primary key column, these two queries are functionally equivalent, but only the second one makes use of the btree index: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE id <@ int4range(10,20); SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE id >= 10 AND id < 20; Multirange example: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE id <@ int4multirange('{[10,20),[30,40)}'); SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE id >= 10 AND id < 20 OR id >= 30 AND id < 40; I think support for this would open up for some interesting new use-cases, when range/multirange could be used to store aggregated intermediate IDs which would then be filtered on using a btree-indexed column. /Joel