Manual Optimisation

Here’s an example of “creative SQL” that I wrote in response to a question on OTN about combining data from two indexes to optimise access to a table. It demonstrates the principle that you can treat an index as a special case of a table – allowing you to make a query go faster by referencing the same table more times.

Unfortunately you shouldn’t use this particular example in a production system because it relies on the data appearing in the right order without having an “order by” clause. This type of thing makes me really keen to have a hint that says something like: /*+ qb_name(my_driver) assume_ordered(@my_driver) */ so that you could tell the optimizer that it can assume that the rowset from a given query block will appear in the order of the final “order by” clause as it does, for example, with sorted hash clusters.