CBO

This post is a brief discussion about the advantages of activating parallelism by altering the session environment instead of using the alternative ways (hints, DDL). The latter ways are the most popular in my experience, but I have noticed that their popularity is actually due, quite frequently, more to imperfect understanding rather than informed decision - and that's a pity since "alter session force parallel query" can really save everyone a lot of tedious work and improve maintainability a great deal.

We will also check that issuing

alter session force parallel query parallel N;

is the same as specifying the hints

/*+ parallel (t,N)  */
/*+ parallel_index (t, t_idx, N) */

for all tables referenced in the query, and for all indexes defined on them (the former is quite obvious, the latter not that much).

Cost Based Oracle – Fundamentals (November 2005)

But the most interesting function for our purposes is sys_op_countchg(). Judging from its name, this function is probably counting changes, and the first input parameter is the block ID portion (object_id, relative file number, and block number) of the table’s rowid, so the function is clearly matching our notional description of how the clustering_factor is calculated. But what is that 1 we see as the second parameter?

Believe me, this article is worth reading I’m currently not allowed to discuss Oracle 12c Database goodies but I am allowed to discuss things perhaps initially intended for 12c that are currently available and already back-ported to 11g. This includes a wonderful improvement in the manageability of how the Clustering Factor (CF) of an index can now […]

Recent thread in the OakTable mailing list prompted me to create a poll and ask about the ways DBAs use system statistics in real systems. If you struggle to understand what system statistics is and what are the available options, here is the suggested reading:
Documentation – System Statistics
Best Practices for Gathering Optimizer Statistics, Oracle whitepaper
System Statistics – Troubleshooting Oracle Performance

A hint is an instruction to the optimizer

This is what’s written in Oracle documentation. Instruction is defined as

a code that tells a computer to perform a particular operation

Which means Oracle CBO must obey the hints and must perform particular operation. The latter is hard to define correctly and explain precisely because it involves the logic of the block-box (what Cost Based Optimizer is). Some of the operations are mentioned in the standard Oracle documentation, some of them scattered across different places, and there are exceptions as usual. I think I’ll list here these cases which could lead to “ignoring hints” with the links to documentation/blogs.

Here’s a summary of a recent posting on OTN:

I have two indexes (REFNO, REFTYPESEQNO) and (REFNO,TMSTAMP,REFTYPESEQNO). When I run the following query the optimizer uses the second index rather than the first index – which is an exact match for the predicates, unless I hint it otherwise:

Issues with OICA/OIC (OPTIMIZER_INDEX_COST_ADJ/OPTIMIZER_INDEX_CACHING) parameters have already been mentioned many times. Recently I’ve noticed one more and I think I didn’t see this case somewhere else on the Internet so I’ll share it.

Here’s a simple table T1 holding 1M rows with the indexed column X having 10 distinct values:

In the previous post I've demonstrated an unexpected Nested Loop Join caused by an extreme data distribution. Although unexpected at first sight, the performance of the execution plan selected by the optimizer is decent - provided the estimates are in the right ballpark.Here is another case of an unexpected execution plan, this time about Merge Joins.

Merge Joins

In order to appreciate why the execution plan encountered is unexpected, first a quick summary about how Merge Joins work:A Merge Join is essentially a Nested Loop operation from one sorted row source into another sorted row source.

Recently I came across some interesting edge cases regarding the costing of joins. They all have in common that they result in (at first sight) unexpected execution plans, but only some of them are actual threats to performance.

Outer Joins

The first one is about outer joins with an extreme data distribution. Consider the following data setup:

create table t1
as
select
        rownum as id
      , rpad('x', 100) as filler
      , case when rownum > 1e6 then rownum end as null_fk
from
        dual
connect by
        level <= 1e6
;

exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(null, 't1')

create table t2
as
select
        rownum as id
      , rpad('x', 100) as filler
from
        dual
connect by
        level <= 1e6
;

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