"Jonathan Hoover" <jhoover@yahoo-inc.com> writes:
> [ poor performance with NOT IN ]
> Query E then is apparently the way to go, but shouldn't there be a way
> to get the query planner to take these steps itself? If A had ever
> finished, I'd sure like to have seen an EXPLAIN ANALYZE on it.
Well, just an EXPLAIN would have told you what the plan was like.
What I suspect was happening was that your manipulations of the query
altered the planner's estimate of the number of rows in the NOT IN's
subquery, causing it to pick (or not) a hash-table-based implementation
of NOT IN. The hashed approach is a lot faster but requires the
subquery's output to fit in work_mem.
In general, NOT IN is hard to optimize because of its weird behavior
for NULLs. I'd suggest looking into converting the query to use an
EXISTS instead.
regards, tom lane