[greenleafjacob]

In Postgres until 9.2, the query plan for prepared statements is fixed at prepare time rather than time of execution, so you might end up with worse query plans. It's worth noting that 9.1 is still the version in Ubuntu 12.04, it's only 14.04 that has 9.3.

[icebraining]

It should be noted that Postgres offers a repository with the latests versions even for Ubuntu 12.04, so you don't need to upgrade the distro or compile PG yourself to use them.

[hultner]

This have been an annoyance in many DBMS-engines, I have previously solved it with recompiles, either triggered or nightly/hourly.

[jldugger]

> It's worth noting that 9.1 is still the version in Ubuntu 12.04, it's only 14.04 that has 9.3.

And the most recent LTS, 16.04, has 9.5.

[raverbashing]

In which case different values would end up have a different query plan? NULL values?

[sixbrx]

That's one of the main points of gathering statistics, so the query plan can depend on the values being queried. At least in Oracle, not sure about Postgres. For long running queries it can be a big win.

[greenleafjacob]

Here is an example [1] that just is a simple equality comparison on an indexed column falling back to a sequential table scan.

[1] http://blog.endpoint.com/2014/04/custom-plans-prepared-state...

[ComodoHacker]

Skewed distribution.