Conditional SQL – 3

I’ve spent the last week in Spain – sightseeing, rather than working – with a minimum amount of access to the Internet.

Inevitably I now have to work hard to catch up with my email. As a moment of light relief in an otherwise irritating chore I thought I’d respond to an emailed request for help. (Regular readers of the blog will know that I don’t usually respond to private email requests for solutions, but sometimes someone gets lucky.)

The question was basically this:  why do I get different execution plans for the following two statements:

Conditional SQL (2)

Some time ago I wrote a note on conditional SQL, commenting on code with predicates like:

         where	t1.n1 = nvl(:n1,t1.n1)

In that article, I showed how Oracle can transform a query of this type using concatenation so that at run time one of two possible execution paths can be taken. But, as often happens,  a simple example leads to more complex questions.

What happens if you have several similar predicates in your query – does Oracle keep doubling the number of possible execution paths for the query: if so, how far does it go, if not are there any side effects to consider? What happens with more complex queries, including joins.

Conditional SQL

Here’s a simplified example of the type of SQL that I often used to see coming from screen generators:

select 	*
from 	t1
where	t1.n1 = nvl(:n1,t1.n1)
;

This code is basically trying to say: “if the user supplies an input value for some on-screen field then return data for that value, otherwise return all the data unconditionally.”