GROUP BY

It’s a simple requirement. We want to transform this:

SQL> select deptno, ename
  2  from   emp
  3  order by 1,2;

    DEPTNO ENAME
---------- ----------
        10 CLARK
        10 KING
        10 MILLER
        20 ADAMS
        20 FORD
        20 JONES
        20 SCOTT
        20 SMITH
        30 ALLEN
        30 BLAKE
        30 JAMES
        30 MARTIN
        30 TURNER
        30 WARD

into this:

The TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE data type that got introduced a long time ago is known for some oddities, for example Tony Hasler has a nice summary of some of them here.Here is another oddity that shows up when trying to aggregate on such a data type. Have a look at the following simple example:

create table t
as
select
        rownum as id
      , date '2000-01-01' + rownum - 1 as some_date
      , cast(date '2000-01-01' + rownum - 1 as timestamp) as some_timestamp
      , cast(date '2000-01-01' + rownum - 1 as timestamp with local time zone) as some_timestamp_with_local_tz
      , cast(date '2000-01-01' + rownum - 1 as timestamp with time zone) as some_timestamp_with_timezone
from
        dual
connect by

When performing aggregate GROUP BY operations an additional filter on the aggregates can be applied using the HAVING clause.Usually aggregates are one of the last steps executed before the final result set is returned to the client.However there are various reasons, why a GROUP BY operation might be somewhere in the middle of the execution plan operation, for example it might be part of a view that cannot be merged (or was hinted not to be merged using the NO_MERGE hint), or in the more recent releases (11g+) the optimizer decided to use the GROUP BY PLACEMENT transformation that deliberately can move the GROUP BY operation to a different execution step of the plan.In such cases, when the GROUP BY operation will be input to some other operation, it becomes essential for the overall efficiency of the execution plan preferred by the optimizer that the cardinality estimates are in the right ballpark, as it will influe