Matthew Wakeling <matthew(at)flymine(dot)org> writes:
> I have encountered what seems to be a bad decision made by the query
> planner, on a quite simple query. I have attached a shell script which
> creates a large (180MB) sql script, to demonstrate the problem.
These queries are forcing the join order; see
http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.2/postgres/explicit-joins.html
The second query forces a bad join order.
Whether this is a bug or a feature depends on your perspective; for now,
it's defined to be a feature ...
regards, tom lane