LOB Length

It’s funny how you can make little savings in work all over the place in Oracle if you’re prepared to look a little closely at what’s going on. Here’s a quirky little example with LOBs and function calls that might just have some greater relevance in other situations. Here’s a little data set, and two queries that I might run against it:

rem
rem     Script:         lob_oddity.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Aug 2014
rem

create table tbl(
	c1      clob
)
lob (c1) store as c_lob(
	disable storage in row
	nocache nologging
)
;

begin
	for i in 1..128 loop
		insert into tbl values(rpad('x',4000));
		commit;
	end loop;
end;
/

commit;

-- collect stats, prime dictionary cache and library cache,
-- run both queries TWICE using autotrace to check stats on 
-- the second run

select
	round(sum(ceil(len/8100)) * 8/1024,0)    used_mb
from
	(
	select
		/*+ no_merge */
		dbms_lob.getlength(c1) len
	from
		tbl
	)
where
	len > 3960
;

select
	round(sum(ceil(len/8100)) * 8/1024,0)    used_mb
from
	(
	select
		rownum rn, dbms_lob.getlength(c1) len
	from
		tbl
	)
where
	len > 3960
;

The question that you might ask yourselves when you see these queries is: will they do similar amounts of work. Of course, I wouldn’t be asking the question if the answer were yes. Despite the no_merge() hint, which you might think would have the same effect as the rownum approach, Oracle seems to execute the call to dbms_lob.getlength() twice for each row in the first query, but only once per row for the second query. Here are the stats (from autotrace) on the second run of the two queries when autotrace is enabled:

Statistics (using no_merge hint)
----------------------------------------------------------
         40  recursive calls
          0  db block gets
        271  consistent gets
          0  physical reads
          0  redo size
        541  bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
        544  bytes received via SQL*Net from client
          2  SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
          0  sorts (memory)
          0  sorts (disk)
          1  rows processed

Statistics (using rownum)
----------------------------------------------------------
          0  recursive calls
          0  db block gets
        131  consistent gets
          0  physical reads
          0  redo size
        541  bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
        544  bytes received via SQL*Net from client
          2  SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
          0  sorts (memory)
          0  sorts (disk)
          1  rows processed

As you can see, the value for “consistent gets” in the no_merge() approach is roughly double that for the rownum approach – and since we have 128 rows/LOBs in the table the numbers looks suspiciously like 2 gets vs. 1 get per LOB depending on the method, and that suggests two calls to the function in the no_merge() case. This hypothesis is corroborated by the execution plans, and especially by the predicate sections (how often have I said “always check the predicates”) which show that the predicate has been pushed inside the view that’s been hinted with no_merge() but it hasn’t been pushed inside the view that uses the rownum instantiation trick:

Execution Plan for no_merge()
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |      |     1 |    13 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE     |      |     1 |    13 |            |          |
|   2 |   VIEW              |      |     6 |    78 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| TBL  |     6 |   522 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter("DBMS_LOB"."GETLENGTH"("C1")>3960)

Execution Plan for rownum
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |     1 |    13 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |      |     1 |    13 |            |          |
|*  2 |   VIEW               |      |   128 |  1664 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    COUNT             |      |       |       |            |          |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| TBL  |   128 | 11136 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("LEN">3960)

My first thought on seeing this difference was to apply the /*+ no_push_pred */ hint to block predicate pushing – but then I remembered that the hint is about join predicate pushing (JPPD) and our code is using a simple filter pushdown. A quick search of the hidden parameters, though, revealed this:

_optimizer_filter_pushdown : enable/disable filter predicate pushdown

Setting this parameter to false – either through a call to ‘alter session’ or through an /*+ opt_param( opt_param(‘_optimizer_filter_pushdown’ , ‘false’) */ hint – allowed the no_merge() approach to produce the same plan and resource usage as the rownum approach. Of course, for a production system, I’d probably use the rownum approach rather than mess around with hidden parameters.

Footnote:

I don’t know why the code with the no_merge() approach reported 40 recursive calls (on its first execution with autotrace). A couple of variations on the experiment suggested that it had something to do with the number of rows (or consequential buffer visits) that survived the predicate call – for a sufficiently small number of rows the recursive call count happened to drop to zero; but the phenomenon needs further investigation.

Update (April 2019)

A quick test with Oracle 18.3 showed two significant differences. The number of consistent gets reported both versions of the code dropped to a number suitable for just a simple tablescan with no lob access (with a small variation – the rownum version reported one extra consistent get: 23 vs. 22).

One of the other tests I set up at the same time replaced the dbms_lob.getlength() function call with the built-in length() call – which didn’t work with LOBs in the very earliest versions. Basically this made no difference to any of the plans or statistics – until 18.3 where there was a small change in the reported predicate for the version with the no_merge hint.  With the length() function and the hint in place the predicate in 12.2.0.1 looked like this:

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter(LENGTH("C1")>3960)

While in 18.3 the predicate was just a little more explicit about what it was doing:

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter(LENGTH("C1" /*+ LOB_BY_VALUE */ )>3960)

This strange pseudo-“hint” in the function is presumably related to the query option for LOB processing that allows you to specify whether you want to fetch LOBs by locator or by value; or maybe it’s just there as a prompt to the next Oracle internal coder that visits the code path.