Optimizer Imperfections With Complex Filters

Erik Darling shows a couple examples of how the optimizer will sometimes pick a superior plan when dealing with complicated filters but not always:

Sometimes, the optimizer can take a query with a complex where clause, and turn it into two queries.

This only happens up to a certain point in complexity, and only if you have really specific indexes to allow these kinds of plan choices.

This is a case where I generally don’t trust the optimizer to get it right. Even when it does, I’d be concerned that this won’t be a stable solution and a minor change somewhere could result in regression to a bad plan.