How does wrapping auth.uid() in a subquery improve Row Level Security performance?

Calling auth.uid() directly inside a policy's USING clause looks harmless, but Postgres treats it as a volatile function call by default, meaning the planner can't assume it returns the same value for every row and may end up re-evaluating it once per row scanned rather than once per query.

Wrapping it as (select auth.uid()) instead gives the planner a subquery it can evaluate once, cache the result as a constant, and then filter every row against that single cached value — the same technique used to make any expensive, row-invariant expression cheaper inside a large scan.

-- Slower: potentially re-evaluated per row
create policy "owner_select" on documents
  for select using (auth.uid() = user_id);

-- Faster: evaluated once, then reused as a constant
create policy "owner_select" on documents
  for select using ((select auth.uid()) = user_id);

On a small table the difference is negligible, but on a table with hundreds of thousands or millions of rows subject to a policy, this rewrite can turn a noticeably slow filtered query into one that performs close to an equivalent query with no RLS at all. It's one of the first things worth checking when a table's read performance mysteriously regresses after enabling RLS.

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