As a quick follow up I just did an explain on the query,
Aggregate (cost=258007258.87..258007258.88 rows=1 width=8) -> Nested Loop (cost=0.00..184292254.83 rows=14743000807 width=16) -> Seq Scan on t1 (cost=0.00..3796.41 rows=263141 width=8) -> Materialize (cost=0.00..1088.40 rows=56027 width=8) -> Seq Scan on t2 (cost=0.00..808.27 rows=56027 width=8) It seems it has to do a loop on 14 billion rows? Can someone explain why this would happen? Thanks, Teddy ________________________________ From: Teddy Schmitz Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2017 12:32:41 PM To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org Subject: Problems with Greatest Hello, I have a query using Greatest that hangs and never returns when called with two tables. Postgres Version: 9.6 Tables t1{ id bigint } t2 { id bigint } they are sharing a sequence the query select greatest(max(t1.id), max(t2.id)) from t1, t2; The purpose was to call setval on the sequence after doing a bulk data load into the database. But this query never returns. I have tried it with various combinations, select greatest(max(t1.id), 6) from t1; -> This returns select greatest(max(t1.id), 6) from t1, t2; -> This never returns. The query does work if there is only a few hundred items between the tables but I'm importing about ~300,000 rows between the two tables. I looked at pg_stat_activity and it says the query is active I worked around this problem using a union all query but I'm wondering if this is a bug or I am just using greatest wrong.