Described herein are approaches for generating execution plans for database commands that include an in-list predicate. The approaches can be used to generate execution plans that exploit the power of in-list iterators in ways and under circumstances not previously supported by conventional DBMSs. An in-list iterator may be used with execution subplans for processing multi-column in-list queries. An in-list iterator is used with execution subplans that scan function-based indexes. The execution plans for a multi-column in-list query limit table scans to only table partitions that contain data that satisfy the query.