From time to time I check the site statistics to see if they give me any clues about why people are coming to blog – and recently I noticed that over the last year a particular referral from the OTN Database forum was had appeared fairly regularly – and it’s one that covers a small but significant optimizer detail that combines two crtical questions: why is the optimizer not using my index and why is the optimizer ignoring my hint under the heading “Index hint does not work”.
I’ll leave you to read the thread – but the short answer is NULL.
A hint is illegal if using it could produce the wrong answer, and indexes where every column is nullable won’t necessarily reference every row in its table.
I’ll say that is the reason I found your blog originally (might have been a google result, but it was the same topic)… but stuck around for the rest of the articles ever since.
Comment by Nathan Neulinger — June 1, 2009 @ 11:02 pm UTC Jun 1,2009 |
I follow it for the tidbits.
You know Oracle’s internals. And those are good to know. SO i come back, even though a great deal of it is over my head.
Comment by Brian Tkatch — June 2, 2009 @ 11:51 am UTC Jun 2,2009 |
That is exactly what I was Asking to myself, thank you for the answer.
Comment by Siwel aragon — June 2, 2009 @ 1:31 pm UTC Jun 2,2009 |