April 2014

The following question came up on OTN recently:

Which one gives better performance? Could please explain.

1) nvl( my_column, ‘N’) <> ‘Y’

2) nvl( my_column, ‘N’) = ‘N’

It’s a question that can lead to a good 20 minute discussion – if you were in some sort of development environment and had a fairly free hand to do whatever you wanted.

The most direct answer is that you could expect the performance to be the same whichever option you chose – but the results might be different, of course, unless you had a constraint on my_column that ensured that it would hold only null, ‘Y’, or ‘N’.  (Reminder:  the constraint check (my_column in (‘Y’,’N’) will allow nulls in the column).

During the OCM Preparation Workshop today in Bucharest, we got into a discussion about parallel inserts vs. direct load with append hint, where I said something like: “I think a parallel insert is always* also a direct load.” Most attendees were satisfied with that, but some still looked a bit sceptical. And I was also not 100% sure about it. While the others practiced, I did a brief research and came up with this answer from Tom Kyte and quoted him: “Parallel is always a direct path, if you go parallel, you will be appending.” Everybody in the room was immediately convinced – only I felt a bit uncomfortable with the outcome myself. After all, I don’t want to teach people to blindly follow my or any other guys claims without checking it if possible.

This post is related to 12c and an active database duplication for a standby I did in my lab environment. I’d say although I first encountered it on 12c there is a chance you run into a similar situation with earlier releases too.

I would normally use ASM for all my databases to make my life easier but this time I had to be mindful of the available memory on the laptop-which at 8 GB-is not plenty. So I went with file system setup instead. After the initial preparations I was ready to launch the one-liner on the standby database:

RMAN> duplicate target database for standby from active database;

This worked away happily for a few moments only to come to an abrupt halt with the below error message. I have started the duplication process on the standby.

I saw this very odd statement on an SAP system last week.

         SELECT /*+ AVOID_FULL ("/bic/xxx") */ * FROM "/BIC/XXX" WHERE "/BIC/XXX"=:A0

I had never seen that hint before so I thought I’d do a little investigation. First I did a quick check on a test case to see if it worked.