Execution plans

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.

A question has just appeared on OTN describing a problem where code that works in 11g doesn’t work in 12c (exact versions not specified). The code in question is a C-based wrapper for some SQL, and the problem is a buffer overflow problem. The query supplied is as follows:

select T1.C1 from T1, T2 where T1.C1 = T2.D1;

The problem is that this works in 11g where the receiving (C) variable is declared as

char myBuffer [31];

but it doesn’t work in 12c unless the receiving variable is declared as:

Here’s a question that came to mind while reading a recent question on the OTN database forum. It’s a question to which I don’t know the answer and, at present, I don’t really want to bother modelling at present – although if I were on a customer site and this looked like a likely explanation for a performance anomaly it’s the sort of thing I would create a model for.

The hoary old question about lower cost queries running faster or slower that higher cost queries has appeared once again on the OTN database forum. It’s one I’ve addressed numerous times in the past – including on this blog – but the Internet being what it is the signal keeps getting swamped by the noise. This time around a couple of “new” thoughts crossed my mind when reading the question.

There is a Time column on the standard forms of the execution plan output, and the description of this column is available in the manuals and has been for years (here’s a definition from v$sql_plan from 10gR2, for example):

One of the optimizer enhancements that appeared in 12.2 for SQL is the “band join”. that makes certain types of merge join much more  efficient.  Consider the following query (I’ll supply the SQL to create the demonstration at the end of the posting) which joins two tables of 10,000 rows each using a “between” predicate on a column which (just to make it easy to understand the size of the result set)  happens to be unique with sequential values though there’s no index or constraint in place:

From time to time someone comes up with the question about whether or not the order of tables in the from clause of a SQL statement should make a difference to execution plans and performance. Broadly speaking the answer is no, although there are a couple of boundary cases were a difference can appear unexpectedly.

There’s a current thread on the OTN database forum showing an execution plan with a slightly unusual feature. It looks like this: