Re: How do I bump a row to the front of sort efficiently

No, it should not be considered a bug or a deficiency. You're telling the system to use a computed value that uses an arbitrary logic construct for sorting, and that's before you actually give it a filter to work with. You're also trying to abuse ORDER BY to make LIMIT do filtering. How do you expect that to go? I would expect the planner to do exactly what you told it you wanted: sort the entire table by that computed value, and it would have to do a sequential scan to compute the value for every row before it knew which ones came first for the LIMIT.

CASE is well known to cause optimization problems; arbitrary conditional logic isn't especially conducive to a planner optimizing things. In general, the planner has no idea what the logic really means, so the planner would have to have some kind of special logic trying to pick up on this case. Your particular use case is uncommon; why should the planner code be junked up with a thousand little optimizations for uncommon situations like this (which would make it unmaintainable) when you already have a reasonable alternative? PG is great for a reason: the devs have made a lot of fantastic choices in designing it. Trying to keep the planner relatively simple is one of them, if I recall correctly.

What you want is well represented by a UNION query: you want it to fetch one particular row by ID, and then you want to tack on 29 other particular rows based on a particular sort order and possibly an offset. These are two completely disparate ways of fetching data; of course the most optimal way is going to be to essentially write two queries and put the results together. That's also going to be the clearest way of writing the query, so the next person to work on it knows what you were doing.

And that aside, you don't even need to use CASE. You could've just used (id = 1), which would give you a boolean result. You can most certainly sort by a boolean. (I believe PG sorts TRUE first.) You should see if that gets optimized at all. (If it doesn't, I won't be surprised and everything else I said still holds.)

By the way, you can do better on your UNION query:

select * from topic
where id = 1000
union all
(select * from topic
where id <> 1000
order by bumped_at desc
limit 29)

I imagine your original would be at risk of LIMITing out the very row you seek to get at the "top", since you don't have an ORDER BY to tell it which ones to keep during the outer LIMIT.