Here’s an example of how a bug-fix can create problems. It’s a code change in 11.2.x.x and (I believe) 10.2.0.5 relating to the costing of queries involving (but perhaps not restricted to) composite partitioned tables. I first saw this change in an email from Doug Burns, who sent me the 10053 traces from a very simple query that had started using the wrong index after an upgrade from 10.2.0.4 to 11.2.0.2.
As part of his testing he had set the optimizer_features_enable parameter back to 10.2.0.4 and found that not only did the choice of index change back to the expected index, but the costs of the two indexes changed dramatically. (The cost of using the “right” index changed from 15 to something in excess of 9,000 on the upgrade!)
Oracle Scratchpad 