10gR2

When two tables are equi-partitioned on their join keys, the query optimizer is able to take advantage of partition-wise joins. To make sure that the tables are equi-partitioned, as of Oracle Database 11g reference partitioning can be used. In fact, per definition, with reference partitioning all “related” tables have exactly the same partitioning schema. If [...]

When using table or index compression certain restrictions apply. Since I find it always hard to gather that information from the manuals and also some of the restrictions are not documented properly or not at all, I'll attempt to summarize the restrictions that I'm aware of here:

1. Compression attribute on subpartitions
Note that you can't define the COMPRESSION on subpartition level - the subpartitions inherit this attribute from the parent partition.

It is however perfectly valid and legal to exchange a subpartition with a compressed table and that way introduce individual compression on subpartition level. It is unclear why this is only possible using this indirect method - it simply looks like a implementation restriction. Since compressed data is most suitable for data warehouse environments and these ought to use EXCHANGE [SUB]PARTITION technology anyway this restriction is probably not that crucial.

2. Number of columns
Basic heap table compression and the new OLTP (in 11.1 called "for all operations") compression are both limited to 255 columns. If you attempt to compress a table with more than 255 columns then no compression will be performed although you don't get an error message. Interestingly the COMPRESSION column in the dictionary still shows "ENABLED" which is certainly misleading.

3. DDL Restrictions - modification of table structure
As soon as a segment contains compressed data or has been marked for compression (does not apply in all cases, see below for more information), the following restrictions regarding the modification of the table structure apply:

Here is another good reason why you probably don't want to use tables with too many columns.

The first good reason is that Oracle stores rows of conventional heap tables with more than 255 columns (where at least one column value after the 255th is non-null) in multiple row pieces even when the entire row may fit into a single block (and up to 11.2 doesn't support basic and OLTP heap table compression on tables with more than 255 columns). This leads to something that is sometimes called "intra-row chaining" which means that Oracle needs to follow the row piece pointer to access columns after the 255th one leading to multiple logical I/Os per row, up to four for a row approaching the hard limit of 1,000 columns.

Of course such a multiple-piece row easily can result in actual row chaining where the row pieces are scattered across different blocks now potentially leading to additional random single block I/O, but I digress...

This simple example allows to see this (and the other, yet to describe) effect in action - it creates by default a table with 1,000 columns with 10,000 rows where each row resides in a separate block (and therefore only intra-row chaining should occur). I used a 8K block size tablespace with Manual Segment Space Management (MSSM) in order to avoid the ASSM overhead in this case:

The aim of this post is to describe a strange (buggy) situation that I observed recently. But before doing that, I shortly summarize what a parent cursor and a child cursor are as well as when they can be shared. By the way, I borrowed this description from the pages 20/21 of my book. Hence, [...]

Today I installed for the first time the patchset 10.2.0.5. While reading the README file, I noticed the following piece of information.
To enable a new native full outer join implementation in the database, a user has to set the following underscore parameter:
_optimizer_native_full_outer_join =force
You can set this parameter for the system or for a specific session.
Besides [...]

Just a quick post that the 10.2.0.5 patch set for Oracle Database Server was released for x86 & x86-64 platforms on April 29th. The patchset number is 8202632 and is available for download from My Oracle Support.

Almost one year ago Iggy Fernandez asked me to write a short text for the Ask the Oracles column of the NoCOUG Journal. The topic was “Bind Variable Peeking: Bane or Boon?”. My text along with the ones of Wolfgang Breitling, Dan Tow and Jonathan Lewis were published in the August issue. For some (unknown) [...]

Last week I had to analyze a strange performance problem. Since the cause/solution was somehow surprising, at least for me, I thought to share it with you.
Let me start by quickly describing the setup and what was done to reproduce the problem:

Database version: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.0.6.0 (64-bit)
Operating system: Solaris 10 (SPARC)
To [...]

Even though a number of articles and blog posts have already been written on this topic (e.g. on Pete Finnigan’s site I found references dating back from 2003), from time to time I’m still asked “How to trace predicates generated by VPD?”. Hence, here’s yet another blog post about this topic…
Let’s setup the scene before [...]

The short answer to this question is “yes”, it does. Unfortunately, the distribution costs are not externalized through the execution plans and, as a result, this limitation (yes, it is really a limitation in the current implementation, not a bug) confuses everyone that carefully look at the information provided in an execution plan of a [...]