I don’t really have anything to do with XMLDB (beyond the fact that it’s an application built in an Oracle database, of course, and subject to tuning and bugs just like any other application), so it was nice to get an email last night from Marco Gralike telling me that the next release of XMLDB was going to include a little enhancement I had suggested to solve a performance issue he was facing with a simple “count(*)” query.
My suggestion was to add a not null constraint to an index on the hidden sys_nc_oid$ column that is the object ID on object table. As I said in a posting on Oracle-L, I couldn’t think of any reason why this would be illegal – and now the constraint is (or will be) official.
Full details are on Marco’s blog.
