Baselines

I’m not very keen on bending the rules on production systems, I’d prefer to do things that look as if they could have happened in a completely legal fashion, but sometimes it’s necessary to abuse the system and here’s an example to demonstrate the point. I’ve got a simple SQL statement consisting of nothing more than an eight table join where the optimizer (on the various versions I’ve tested, including 12c) examines 5,040 join orders (even though _optimizer_max_permutations is set to the default of 2,000 – and that might come as a little surprise if you thought you knew what that parameter was supposed to do):

select
	/*+ star */
	d1.p1, d2.p2, d3.p3,
	d4.p4, d5.p5, d6.p6,
	d7.p7,
	f.small_vc
from
	dim1		d1,
	dim2		d2,
	dim3		d3,
	dim4		d4,
	dim5		d5,
	dim6		d6,
	dim7		d7,
	fact_tab	f
where
	d1.v1 = 'abc'
and	d2.v2 = 'def'
and	d3.v3 = 'ghi'
and	d4.v4 = 'ghi'
and	d5.v5 = 'ghi'
and	d6.v6 = 'ghi'
and	d7.v7 = 'ghi'
and	f.id1 = d1.id
and	f.id2 = d2.id
and	f.id3 = d3.id
and	f.id4 = d4.id
and	f.id5 = d5.id
and	f.id6 = d6.id
and	f.id7 = d7.id
;

It’s useful to have such extreme examples because they make it easy to notice certain features of Oracle’s behaviour – in this case the difference between SQL Plan Baselines and SQL Profiles. After I had created a baseline for this statement the optimizer still examined 5,040 join orders because that’s the way that baselines work – the optimizer first tries to optimize the statement without the baseline in case it can produce a better plan (for future evaluation and evolution) than the plan dictated by the baseline.

In my example this wasn’t really a problem (apart from the memory requirement in the SGA) but one of my clients has a production query that takes 7 seconds to optimize then runs in a few seconds more, so I’d like to get rid of that 7 seconds … without touching the code. Adding a baseline won’t reduce the time to optimize. (Note: 7 seconds may not seem like a lot, but when several copies of this query are executed concurrently using a different literal value as an input, that 7 seconds can go up to anything between 40 and 500 seconds of CPU parse time per query).

If I take a different tack and write some code to acquire the content of the SQL Plan Baseline (viz. the outline section from the in-memory execution plan) but store it as an SQL Profile the optimizer simply follows the embedded hints and examines just one join order (because the set of hints includes a leading() hint specifying exactly the join order required). This is why I will, occasionally, take advantage of the code that Kerry Osborne and Randolf Geist produced some time ago to raid the library cache for a child cursor and store its plan outline as an SQL profile.

Footnote:

This dirty trick doesn’t always solve the problem – the first example I tried to use for my demonstration did a complex concatenation that took a couple of minutes to optimise, and storing the baseline as a profile didn’t help.