Execution Plans

There are many ways to design tables/schemas and many ways to write SQL queries that execute against those tables/schemas. Some designs are better than others for various reasons, however, I think that frequently people underestimate the power of SQL (for both “good” and “evil”). All too often in data warehouses, I see tables designed...
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Over the past couple days I’ve been reading through the recent paper by Karen Morton entitled “Managing Statistics for Optimal Query Performance“. In this paper Karen goes over many of the topics I have discussed as well (and a few that I have not) in the following blog posts: Troubleshooting Bad Execution Plans There...
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I’ve written before on choosing an optimal stats gathering strategy but I recently came across a scenario that I didn’t directly blog about and think it deserves attention. As I mentioned in that previous post, one should only deviate from the defaults when they have a reason to, and fully understand that reason and...
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Note: Originally this experiment was from a post I wrote on the Oracle Forum: Database – General. I recommend that you read Jonathan Lewis’ summarization of the thread instead of reading all 671 posts (as of today). You will spend much less time and get more out of the discussion. One of the new...
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Previously I blogged about the new and improved DBMS_STATS.AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE used to calculate NDV in Oracle 11g and now I wanted to touch on another new feature of DBMS_STATS in 11g: Incremental Global Statistics On Partitioned Tables. Before Incremental Global Stats (Two-Pass Method) When DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS collects statistics on a partitioned table, generally it does so...
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Recently I was reading this thread, “Trying to make use of bitmap indexes” on the Oracle Forum. Before I had finished a working example, Jonathan Lewis had posted his response which was on par with my thoughts. Since this is a topic I see frequently, I thought I would finish my experiment and publish...
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Recently someone showed me a query execution plan with an operation of HASH JOIN ANTI NA. At first, it was thought maybe it was a bug and the operation had a type-o in it, but after further research it was discovered it was a valid operation and a new cost-based query transformation for subquery...
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Recently the Oracle Optimizer Development Team put out a White Paper entitled Upgrading from Oracle Database 9i to 10g: What to expect from the Optimizer. This paper discusses the main differences between 9i and 10g in the subject area of the Optimizer and Statistics. As G.I. Joe said, “Now we know! And knowing is...
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I recently came across a query in which the Optimizer was making a poor cardinality estimate, which in turn caused inefficient join type, which in turn caused the query to run excessively long. This post is a reenactment of my troubleshooting. The Suspect SQL The original SQL was quite large and had a fairly...
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A few months ago the Oracle Optimizer Team did a blog post entitled Outerjoins in Oracle. In the Lateral View section of that post they go through some examples and discuss how a query is transformed with the ANSI outer join syntax. I thought it would be useful to go through an example that...
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Many times a DBA wants to know where a SQL statement is in its execution plan and where the time is being spent. There are a few ways to find out this information, but an 11g new feature makes gathering this information extremely easy. Oracle 11g Real-Time SQL Monitoring allows you to monitor the...
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I’ve been working on a few test cases and I’m in search of some real-world data. If your production Oracle database uses system statistics, either Workload Statistics or Noworkload Statistics, and you are willing to share them, please post a comment with the output from the following two queries: select version from v$instance; select...
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