Yes, there are reasons to use less efficient methods to get results. You just have to realize that doing so may cause performance issues. Making the query have an ORDER BY clause might get the planner to use the index, and maybe at some point the scanner will be smart enough to think of skipping. Adding functional indexes to the table (for the values of x & n that you use a lot) but this might not help if the n is provided as a binding to ? as that is too later for the planner to act on it. (This assumes that adding indexes doesn't trigger as much of an issue as other Schema changes.) Adding indexes also will add overhead to every change to that table. If efficiency isn't significant, don't worry about it.