Re: BUG #4899: Open parenthesis breaks query plan

"Peter Headland" <pheadland(at)actuate(dot)com> writes:
> While noodling around some more, I found that a comparison to '()'
> allows use of the index, as does '(abc)' and even '(a(b(c)d)e)'. It
> appears that mismatched open/close paren pairs trigger the
> bug. Obviously something is parsing the string literal and mishandling
> parentheses.

This isn't "obvious" at all, and in fact your theory is pretty much
nonsense. What I think is happening is that '(' is a sufficiently
common value that the planner thinks a seqscan is superior to an
indexscan for it. However, since you have not shown us EXPLAIN output
(much less EXPLAIN ANALYZE output), that's just a guess.

regards, tom lane