Too Many OR's?

I have a query that's making the planner do the wrong thing (for my
definition of wrong) and I'm looking for advice on what to tune to make
it do what I want.

The query consists or SELECT'ing a few fields from a table for a large
number of rows. The table has about seventy thousand rows and the user
is selecting some subset of them. I first do a SELECT...WHERE to
determine the unique identifiers I want (works fine) and then I do a
SELECT WHERE IN giving the list of id's I need additional data on
(which I see from EXPLAIN just gets translated into a very long list of
OR's).

Everything works perfectly until I get to 65301 rows. At 65300 rows,
it does an index scan and takes 2197.193 ms. At 65301 rows it switches
to a sequential scan and takes 778951.556 ms. Values known not to
affect this are: work_mem, effective_cache_size. Setting
random_page_cost from 4 to 1 helps (79543.214 ms) but I'm not really
sure what '1' means, except it's relative. Of course, setting
'enable_seqscan false' helps immensely (2337.289 ms) but that's as
inelegant of a solution as I've found - if there were other databases
on this install that wouldn't be the right approach.

Now I can break this down into multiple SELECT's in code, capping each
query at 65300 rows, and that's a usable workaround, but academically
I'd like to know how to convince the planner to do it my way. It's
making a bad guess about something but I'm not sure what. I didn't see
any hard-coded limits grepping through the source (though it is close
to the 16-bit unsigned boundry - probably coincidental) so if anyone
has ideas or pointers to how I might figure out what's going wrong that
would be helpful.

Thanks,
-Bill

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Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440
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