Hi,
I have a performance problem with my query. As a simplified example, I have a 
table called Book, which has three columns: id, released (timestamp) and 
author_id. I have a need to search for the latest books released by multiple 
authors, at a specific point in the history. This could be latest book between 
beginning of time and now, or latest book released last year etc. In other 
words, only the latest book for each author, in specific time window. I have 
also a combined index for released and author_id columns.
First, I tried a simple query that selects maximum value of released and the 
author_id, which are grouped by the author_id (then later do a join by these 
author_id, released columns to get the whole rows).  Performance of this query 
is pretty bad (Execution time around 250-300ms for five authors). See query and 
query plan in the link below:
https://gist.github.com/jehie/ca9fac16b6e3c19612d815446a0e1bc0

The execution time seems to grow linearly when the number of author_ids 
increase (50ms per author_id). I don't completely understand why it takes so 
long for this query to execute and why it does not use the directional index 
scan?
I also tried second query using limit (where I can only ask for one author_id 
at a time, so cannot use this directly when searching for books of multiple 
author), which performs nicely (0.2ms):
https://gist.github.com/jehie/284e7852089f6debe22e05c63e73027f

So, any ideas how to make multiple-author lookups (like in the first query) 
perform better? Or any other ideas?

Here is the SQL to create the Table, Index, generate some test data and both 
queries:
https://gist.github.com/jehie/87665c03bee124f8a96de24cae798194

Thanks,
Jesse

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