Curious why planner can't handle NOT IN - Mailing list pgsql-general

I have an `account` table with 5.3M rows, with primary key `id` of
type `text` (and 600+ columns if that matters).

I'm trying to create a `newaccount` table with the same schema but
600k newly imported rows, then insert all the old rows for which `id`
isn't already in the set of newly updated rows.

=> create table newaccount as select * from account limit 0;

=> \copy newaccount from stdin with (format csv)
[...copy 600k rows in...]

=> analyze newaccount;

The most obvious query doesn't work so hot due to repeated execution
of the subplan:

=> explain insert into newaccount select * from account where id not
in (select id from account);

                                       QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Insert on newaccount  (cost=0.00..458800400224.89 rows=2985976 width=5366)
   ->  Seq Scan on account  (cost=0.00..458800400224.89 rows=2985976 width=5366)
         Filter: (NOT (SubPlan 1))
         SubPlan 1
           ->  Materialize  (cost=0.00..153276.00 rows=150000 width=32)
                 ->  Seq Scan on newaccount  (cost=0.00..151500.00
rows=150000 width=32)
(6 rows)

This works fine, though:

=> explain insert into newaccount select * from account where id in
(select id from account except select id from newaccount);

                                                       QUERY PLAN

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Insert on newaccount  (cost=3749026.24..14034547.77 rows=2985976 width=5366)
   ->  Hash Join  (cost=3749026.24..14034547.77 rows=2985976 width=5366)
         Hash Cond: (account.id = "ANY_subquery".id)
         ->  Seq Scan on account  (cost=0.00..2263744.51 rows=5971951
width=5366)
         ->  Hash  (cost=3633552.85..3633552.85 rows=5971951 width=32)
               ->  Subquery Scan on "ANY_subquery"
(cost=3543223.59..3633552.85 rows=5971951 width=32)
                     ->  SetOp Except  (cost=3543223.59..3573833.34
rows=5971951 width=19)
                           ->  Sort  (cost=3543223.59..3558528.47
rows=6121951 width=19)
                                 Sort Key: "*SELECT* 1".id
                                 ->  Append  (cost=0.00..2476464.02
rows=6121951 width=19)
                                       ->  Subquery Scan on "*SELECT*
1"  (cost=0.00..2323464.02 rows=5971951 width=19)
                                             ->  Seq Scan on account
(cost=0.00..2263744.51 rows=5971951 width=19)
                                       ->  Subquery Scan on "*SELECT*
2"  (cost=0.00..153000.00 rows=150000 width=32)
                                             ->  Seq Scan on
newaccount  (cost=0.00..151500.00 rows=150000 width=32)
(14 rows)

This is all in PG 9.1.

This isn't a big deal as there's a straightforward workaround, but I
am curious what happened here.  Googling turns up various mentions of
"NOT IN" with poor plans that involve subplans.  Then again I have
read mention of hash anti-join which seems appropriate here(?), but
that wasn't used here (nor was the latter join used, though for
whatever reason it looks like a more complex/deeper plan tree than I
had expected, so maybe it was out of the plan generator's reach?).

E.g. the following mentions cranking up work_mem, but I probably can't
crank up work_mem to meet the requirements of this example, and even
if it doesn't fit in memory, it'd be nice for the planner to not
degenerate to a pathological plan and still execute this join
efficiently while spilling to and from disk.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7125291/postgresql-not-in-versus-except-performance-difference-edited-2

Thanks!