thank You for Yore expaination!

Best regards,
Paul

For any recent version of Oracle the leading() hint is more appropriate than the ordered() hint, but in principle hinting the underlying gv$sql_shared_memory view is the appropriate fix from Oracle.

The GV$ view has been around since at least 8.1.7.4, so I suspect the developer who wrote it thought that the hint use_nl(h c) was specifying the order of the join – it’s only in very recent releases of the manuals that Oracle has stated explicitly that this form of the hint is a short-hand for /*+ use_nl(h) use_nl(c) */ and not a multi-table hint.

I wouldn’t expect the query block name to change unless Oracle did something to introduce more (or differently named) query blocks in the GV$ view – and we hope they’d only do that if they fixed the thing to work properly anyway.

Now that’s an odd one, I like that.

If you were replacing the query would you be safe to simply place an ORDERED hint before the use_nl hint to ensure the table order and thus the working of the code.
In fact, as it is so critical in this case one wonders why it is not stated in that way.

Could the query block name change in a future version, rendering your hint invalid – but by using your own view you would be protected against such things? Mind you, if the query block name changes, that may well be because the view definition has changed so you would need to alter your hand-crafted view too…

Martin