statistics

Here is a little note about the SYS.STATS_TARGET$ table used by the automatic statistics gathering job run at maintenance window, or when running it manually with:

exec dbms_auto_task_immediate.gather_optimizer_stats

This table is not documented and has no view on it, so those are only my guesses about what I observed, and comments are welcome. Basically, this table is used by the Auto Stats job to list the tables to process, from one execution to the other.

Note that in 12c the same information is updated into DBA_OPTSTAT_OPERATION_TASKS and visible through DBMS_STATS.REPORT_STATS_OPERATIONS. But I still use STATS_TARGET$ so see in real-time what is currently processed.

Columns description

STATUS

When the Auto Stats job lists the objects to process, they are in state PENDING (STATUS=0).

Just a short post today on something that came in as a question for the upcoming Office Hours session which I thought could be covered quickly in a blog post without needing a lot of additional discussion for which Office Hours is more suited to.

The question was:

“When I gather statistics using DBMS_STATS, can I just create a statistic table and pass that as a parameter to get the results of the gather”

And the answer simply is “No” but let me clear up the confusion.

This note is a variant of a note that I wrote a few months ago about the impact of nulls on column groups. The effect showed up recently on a client site with a little camouflage that confused the issue for a little while, so I thought it would be worth a repeat.  We’ll start with a script to generate some test data:

A recent thread on the ODC database forum highlighted a case where the optimizer was estimating 83,000 for a particular index full scan when the SQL Monitor output for the operation showed that it was returning 11,000,000 rows.

Apart from the minor detail that the OP didn’t specifically ask a question, the information supplied was pretty good. The OP had given us a list of bind variables, with values, and the SQL statement, followed by the text output of the Monitor’ed SQL and, to get the predicate section of the plan, the output from a call to dbms_xplan. This was followed by the DDL for the critical index and a list of the stats for all the columns in the index.

So far in this series I’ve written about the way that the optimizer estimates cardinality for an equijoin where one end of the join has a frequency histogram and the other end has a histogram of type:

I’ve got a data set which I’ve recreated in 11.2.0.4 and 12.2.0.1.

I’ve generated stats on the data set, and the stats are identical.

I don’t have any indexes or extended stats, or SQL Plan directives or SQL Plan Profiles, or SQL Plan Baselines, or SQL Patches to worry about.

I’m joining two tables, and the join column on one table has a frequency histogram while the join column on the other table has a height-balanced histogram.  The histograms were created with estimate_percent => 100%. (which explains why I’ve got a height-balanced histogram in 12c rather than a hybrid histogram.)

Here are the two execution plans, 11.2.0.4 first, pulled from memory by dbms_xplan.display_cursor():

In previous installments of this series I’ve been describing how Oracle estimates the join cardinality for single column joins with equality where the columns have histograms defined. So far I’ve  covered two options for the types of histogram involved: frequency to frequency, and frequency to top-frequency. Today it’s time to examine frequency to hybrid.

My first thought about this combination was that it was likely to be very similar to frequency to top-frequency because a hybrid histogram has a list of values with “repeat counts” (which is rather like a simple frequency histogram), and a set of buckets with variable sizes that could allow us to work out an “average selectivity” of the rest of the data.

Here’s one I’ve just discovered while trying to build a reproducible test case – that didn’t reproduce because an internal algorithm has changed.

If you upgrade from 12c to 18c and have a number of hybrid histograms in place you may find that some execution plans change because of a change in the algorithm for producing hybrid histograms (and that’s not just if you happen to get the patch that fixes the top-frequency/hybrid bug relating to high values).

Here’s a little test to demonstrate how I wasted a couple of hours trying to solve the wrong problem – first a simple data set:

Sometimes a good thing becomes at bad thing when you hit some sort of special case – today’s post is an example of this that came up on the Oracle-L listserver a couple of years ago with a question about what the optimizer was doing. I’ll set the scene by creating some data to reproduce the problem:

Oracle 12c introduced the “Hybrid” histogram – a nice addition to the available options and one that (ignoring the bug for which a patch has been created) supplies the optimizer with better information about the data than the equivalent height-balanced histogram. There is still a problem, though, in the trade-off between accuracy and speed: just as it does with height-balanced histograms when using auto_sample_size Oracle samples (typically) about 5,500 rows to create a hybrid histogram, and the SQL it uses to generate the necessary summary is essentially an aggregation of the sample, so either you have a small sample with the risk of lower accuracy or a large sample with an increase in workload.