I thought I had read somewhere that Postges could ignore a join if it was not necessary because there were no columns from the table or view selected in the query. Is this possible?
You might be thinking of this enhancement introduced in 9.0:
Outer joins where the inner side is unique and not referenced above the join are unnecessary and are therefore now removed. This will accelerate many automatically generated queries, such as those created by object-relational mappers (ORMs).
