Execution plans

This is a note I drafted in September 2015 and only rediscovered a couple of days ago while searching for something I was sure I’d written about collections and/or table functions. The intention of collections and table functions is that they should behave like tables when you use them in a query – but there are cases where a real table and something cast to a table() aren’t treated the same way by the optimizer – and this 4-year old note (which is still valid in 2020 for 19c) is one of those cases.

The ODC SQL and PL/SQL forum came up with an example a couple of days ago that highlighted an annoying limitation in the optimizer’s handling of table functions. The requirement was for a piece of SQL that would generate “installments” information from a table of contract agreements and insert into another table any installments that were not yet recorded there.

The mechanism to turn a single row of contract data into a set of installments was a (optionally pipelined) table function that involved some business logic that (presumably) dealt with the timing and size of the installments. The final SQL to create the data that needed to be inserted was reported as follows (though it had clearly been somewhat modified):

The problem with finding something new and fiddling with it and checking to see how you can best use it to advantage is that you sometimes manage to “break” it very quickly. In yesterday’s blog note I introduced the /*+ push_having_to_gby(@qbname) */ hint and explained why it was a useful little enhancement. I also showed a funny little glitch with a missing predicate in the execution plan.

Today I thought I’d do something a little more complex with the example I produced yesterday, and I’ve ended up with a little note that’s not actually about the hint, it’s about something that appeared in my initial testing of the hint, and then broke when I pushed it a little further. Here’s a script to create data for the new test:

I came across an interesting new hint recently when checking the Outline Data for an execution plan: /*+ push_having_to_gby() */  It’s an example of a “small” change designed to reduce CPU usage by reducing the volume of data that passes through the layers of calls that an execution plan represents. The hint appeared in 18.3 but I’ve run the following on 19.3 as a demonstration of what it does and why it’s a good thing:

This is an observation that came up on the Oracle Developer Forum a couple of days ago, starting life as the fairly common problem:

I have a “select” that runs quickly  but when I use in a “create as select” it runs very slowly.

In many cases this simply means that the query was a distributed query and the plan changed because the driving site changed from the remote to the local server. There are a couple of other reasons, but distributed DML is the one most commonly seen.

In this example, though, the query was not a distributed query, it was a fully local query. There were three features to the query that were possibly suspect, though:

A question about hunting down the source of the error “ORA-01652 unable to extend temp segment by NNN in tablespace XXX” shows up on the Oracle-L mailing list or the Oracle developer community forum from time to time. In most cases the tablespace referenced is the temporary tablespace, which means the session reporting the error was probably trying to allocate some space for sorting, or doing a hash join, or instantiating a GTT (global temporary table) or a CTE (common table expression / “with” subquery). The difficulty in cases like this is that the session reporting the error might be the victim of some other session’s greed – so looking at what the session was doing won’t necessarily point you to the real problem.

This note was prompted by an error I made at the UKOUG TechFest19 yesterday. It’s fairly well-known that when you read an execution plan that includes the rowsource execution stats – so you get the E-rows (estimated) and A-rows (Actual) reported – then a sensible check of the quality of the optimizer’s calculations is to compare the estimates and actuals allowing for the fact that the E-rows is “per start” and the A-rows is “cumulative”, so A-rows = E-rows * Starts.

The error I made yesterday was to forget that this relationship isn’t always true. In particular partitioning and parallel query introduced the need to be a little flexibility in reading the numbers – which I’ll demonstrate with a coupld of simple examples running under 12.2.0.1

It’s another of my double-entendre titles. The optimizer can turn a hash join involving an index-organized table into a real performance disaster (though you may have to help it along the way by using a silly definition for your primary key columns). This post was inspired by a question posted on the Oracle Developer Community forum recently so the table and column names I’ve used in my model reflect (almost, with a few corrections) the names used in the post.

We start with a simple requirement expressed through the following SQL:

Here’s a thought that falls somewhere between philosophical and pragmatic. It came up while I was playing around with a problem from the Oracle database forum that was asking about options for rewriting a query with a certain type of predicate. This note isn’t really about that question but the OP supplied a convenient script to demonstrate their requirement and I’ve hi-jacked most of the code for my own purposes so that I can ask the question:

Should the presence of an intermediate view name generated by the optimizer in the course of cost-based query transformation cause two plans, which are otherwise identical and do exactly the same thing, to have different plan hash values ?

To demonstrate the issue let’s start with a simple script to create some data and generate an execution plan.

Here’s an odd, and unpleasant, detail about querying v$session in the “most obvious” way. (And if you were wondering what made me resurrect and complete a draft on “my session id” a couple of days ago, this posting is the reason). Specifically if you want to select some information for your own session from v$session the query you’re likely to use in any recent version of Oracle will probably be of the form:

select {list for columns} from v$session where sid = to_number(sys_context('userenv','sid'));

Unfortunately that one little statement hides two anomalies – which you can see in the execution plan. Here’s a demonstration cut from an SQL*Plus session running under 19.3.0.0: