Optimising queries involving unions

Hi,

I've got a query that I think the query optimiser should be able
to work it's magic on but it doesn't! I've had a look around and
asked on the IRC channel and found that the current code doesn't
attempt to optimise for what I'm asking it to do at the moment.
Here's a bad example:

SELECT u.txt
FROM smalltable t, (
SELECT id, txt FROM largetable1
UNION ALL
SELECT id, txt FROM largetable2) u
WHERE t.id = u.id
AND t.foo = 'bar';

I was hoping that "smalltable" would get moved up into the union,
but it doesn't at the moment and the database does a LOT of extra
work. In this case, I can manually do quite a couple of transforms
to move things around and it does the right thing:

SELECT txt
FROM (
SELECT l.id as lid, r.id as rid, r.foo, l.txt
FROM largetable1 l, smalltable r
UNION ALL
SELECT l.id as lid, r.id as rid, r.foo, l.txt
FROM largetable1 l, smalltable r)
WHERE foo = 'bar';
AND lid = rid

The optimiser is intelligent enough to move the where clauses up
into the union and end end up with a reasonably optimal query.
Unfortunatly, in real life, the query is much larger and reorganising
everything manually isn't really feasible!

Is this a good place to ask about this or is it more in the realm
of the hackers mailing list?

Thanks,
Sam