Execution plans

There’s always another hurdle to overcome. After I’d finished writing up the “index bouncy scan” as an efficient probing mechanism to find the combinations of the first two columns (both declared not null) of a very large index a follow-up question appeared almost immediately: “what if it’s a partitioned index”.

A two-part question about the FILTER operation appeared on the Oracle-L list server a couple of days ago. The first part was a fairly common question – one that’s often prompted by the way the optimizer used to behave in older versions of Oracle. Paraphrased, it was: “Why is the total cost of the query so high compared to the sum of its parts?”

Here’s the query, and the execution plan.

I’ve been prompted by a recent question on the ODC database forum to revisit a note I wrote nearly five years ago about bitmap join indexes and their failure to help with join cardinalities. At the time I made a couple of unsupported claims and suggestions without supplying any justification or proof. Today’s article finally fills that gap.

I’ve mentioned the SQL Monitor report from time to time as a very useful way of reviewing execution plans – the feature is automatically enabled by parallel execution and by queries that are expected to take more than a few seconds to complete, and the inherent overheads of monitoring are less than the impact of enabling the rowsource execution statistics that allow you to use the ‘allstats’ format of dbms_xplan.display_cursor() to get detailed execution information for a query. The drawback to the SQL Monitor feature is that it doesn’t report predicate information.

It can be difficult to find the critical differences when comparing execution plans when you want to find out why the optimizer has changed its choice of plan and what may have happened to cause the change, and even the various diff_plan_xxx() functions in dbms_xplan don’t help very much, so I thought I’d write up an example that appeared recently on the ODC database forum to give people some ideas about how to approach the problem. There is, however, no simple algorithm that you can apply to narrow your focus down to the most probable cause of change, there are simply a few methods that have to be applied with a little flair and imagination.

Here’s a note that has been sitting around for more than 3 years (the draft date is Jan 2015), waiting for me to finish it off; and in that time we’ve got a new version of Oracle that changes the solution to the problem it presented. (I also managed to write “Conditional SQL –  6” in the intervening period !)

This posting started with a question on the OTN (now ODC) database forum about an execution plan used by 11.2.0.3.  Here’s a model to represent the data and the query:

An interesting observation appeared recently as a side-channel on a question on the OTN database forum – how does Oracle execute an unpivot() operation. Here’s an example of such a query:

If you’re familiar with SQL Profiles and SQL Baselines you may also know about SQL Patches – a feature that allows you to construct hints that you can attach to SQL statements at run-time without changing the code. Oracle 12c Release 2 introduces a couple of important changes to this feature:

• It’s now official – the feature had been copied from package dbms_sqldiag_internal to package dbms_sqldiag.
• The limitation of 500 characters has been removed from the hint text – it’s now a CLOB column.

H/T to Nigel Bayliss for including this detail in his presentation to the UKOUG last week, and pointing out that it’s also available for Standard Edition.

Here’s a performance problem that came up on OTN recently. The following query (reformatted) takes “ages” to run – how do you address the problem:

SELECT
	COUNT(*) 
FROM
	smp_dbuser2.workflow_step_report
WHERE
	report_ID IN (
		SELECT	report_id
		FROM	smp_dbuser2.workflow_report
		WHERE	trunc(start_time) = '28-Apr-2017'
		AND	user_id = 'nbi_ssc'
	)
;

Various pieces of relevant information were supplied (the workflow_report table holds 1.4M rows the workflow_step_report table holds 740M rows and some indexes were described), but most significantly we were given the execution plan:

A question came up on the OTN database forum a little while ago about a very simple query that was taking different execution paths on two databases with the same table and index definitions and similar data. In one database the plan used the “index full scan (min/max)” operation while the other database used a brute force “index fast full scan” operation.