SQL

One of the new features in 18c is the ability to ignore any optimizer hints in a session or across the entire database. A motivation for this feature is obviously our own Autonomous Data Warehouse, where we want to optimize queries without the potential “baggage” of user nominated hints strewn throughout the code.

This would seem a fairly easy function to implement, namely, as we parse the SQL, simply rip out anything that is a comment structured as a hint. At the Perth Oracle User Group conference yesterday, I had an interesting question from an attendee – namely, if all optimizer hints are being ignored, then does this mean that every hint will be ignored. In particular, what about the (very useful) QB_NAME hint? If we are just stripping out anything that is in a hint text format, we will lose those as well?

So it’s time for a test!

Yes it’s SCBT day here in Perth!

SCBT = Silly Click Bait Title

This post is just a cautionary tale that it is easy to get caught up judging SQL performance solely on a few metrics rather than taking a more common sense approach of assessing performance based on the true requirements of the relevant component of the application.  I say “true requirements” because it may vary depending on what is important to the application for a particular component.

In an Office Hours session a couple of months back, I covered an important change that comes to regular expressions once you upgrade to 12c Release 2. You can see the video covering the issue here:

but for the TL;DR brigade reading this post: Regular expressions are not deterministic when you take NLS settings into account and thus cannot be used in constraints and/or function-based indexes.

This is just a post to quickly revisit the topic for anyone thinking of upgrading from an earlier release to 12c Release 2. An AskTOM question came in asking what would happen to such constraints during the upgrade process.

Do a quick Google search and you’ll find plenty of blog posts about why GUIDs are superior to integers for a unique identifier, and of course, an equal number of posts about why integers are superior to GUIDs. In the Oracle world, most people have been using sequence numbers since they were pretty much the only option available to us in earlier versions. But developers coming from other platforms often prefer GUIDs simply due to their familiarity with them.

By Franck Pachot

.
I know that lot of people are against the ANSI join syntax in Oracle. And this goes beyond the limits when talking about NATURAL JOIN. But I like them and use them quite often.

I had a fun request come in from a colleague the other day.  They had a simple list of fully qualified file names and they needed to present that data in the familiar hierarchical tree layout. 

To demonstrate, I took a little trip down memory lane and grabbed a subset of presentations I’ve done over the years.

Let’s face it. Concurrency is a good thing when it comes to database applications.

Solving performance issues is not magic. Oh, I’m not saying it is always easy and I am not saying that you do not need both a lot of knowledge and also creativity. But it is not a dark art, at least not on Oracle systems where we have a wealth of tools and instrumentation to help us. But it can feel like that, especially when you lack experience of systematically solving performance issues.

Jonathan Lewis just published a blog post about NVL and COALESCE and the optimizer costings for each.

There is also perhaps a significant difference between NVL and COALESCE in that the former seems to have an in-built optimization for handling bind variables and nulls. 

Consider an application where users optionally pass in search criteria and you have to query a table based on that criteria.  You have three natural choices here to implement that:

WHERE column = :search_criteria or :search_criteria is null

or

WHERE column = nvl(:search_criteria ,column)

or

WHERE column = coalesce(:search_criteria,column)

Functionally they are identical*, but the implementation detail shows a nice little optimizer trick that only works with NVL.

ODC Appreciation Day is an idea that Tim Hall (aka Oracle-Base) came up with, to show out appreciation for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN)/Oracle Developer Community.