--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Ann Harrison <aharrison@...> wrote:

>As long as the fields are comparable - meaning your not joining a
> floating point number to a date - the optimizer should work on them.
> It may be that the order of the left joins leaves no opportunity to
> use the indexed terms. As you said, inner joins are much easier for
> the optimizer to handle.

Which is why I pared down my query to no joins at all in my original post. A simple query that just lists the complete table. It still uses un-indexed reads.

It is very good to know about the fields being comparable....thanks for that gem!