Plan depth

A recent posting on OTN reminded me that I haven’t been poking Oracle 12c very hard to see which defects in reporting execution plans have been fixed. The last time I wrote something about the problem was about 20 months ago referencing 11.2.0.3; but there are still oddities and irritations that make the nice easy “first child first” algorithm fail because the depth calculated by Oracle doesn’t match the level that you would get from a connect-by query on the underlying plan table. Here’s a simple fail in 12c:

rem
rem     Script:         plan_gaps.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Jan 2013
rem

create table t1
as
select
        rownum                  id,
        lpad(rownum,200)        padding
from    all_objects
where   rownum <= 2500  -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

create table t2
as
select  * from t1
;

-- call dbms_stats to gather stats

explain plan for
select
        case mod(id,2)
                when 1 then (select max(t1.id) from t1 where t1.id <= t2.id)  -- > comment as above
                when 0 then (select max(t1.id) from t1 where t1.id >= t2.id)
        end id
from    t2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

It ought to be fairly clear that the two inline scalar subqueries against t1 should be presented at the same level in the execution hierarchy; but here’s the execution plan you get from Oracle:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |  2500 | 10000 | 28039   (2)| 00:00:02 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |      |     1 |     4 |            |          |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T1   |   125 |   500 |    11   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    SORT AGGREGATE    |      |     1 |     4 |            |          |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |   125 |   500 |    11   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T2   |  2500 | 10000 |    11   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("T1"."ID"<=:B1)
   4 - filter("T1"."ID">=:B1)

As you can see, the immediate (default?) visual impression you get from the plan is that one of the subqueries is subordinate to the other. On the other hand if you check the id and parent_id columns from the plan_table you’ll find that lines 1 and 3 are both direct descendents of line 0 – so they ought to have the same depth. The plan below is what you get if you run the 8i query from utlxpls.sql against the plan_table populated in 12c.

SQL> select id, parent_id from plan_table;

        ID  PARENT_ID
---------- ----------
         0
         1          0
         2          1
         3          0
         4          3
         5          0

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Operation                 |  Name    |  Rows | Bytes|  Cost  | Pstart| Pstop |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| SELECT STATEMENT          |          |     2K|    9K|  28039 |       |       |
|  SORT AGGREGATE           |          |     1 |    4 |        |       |       |
|   TABLE ACCESS FULL       |T1        |   125 |  500 |     11 |       |       |
|  SORT AGGREGATE           |          |     1 |    4 |        |       |       |
|   TABLE ACCESS FULL       |T1        |   125 |  500 |     11 |       |       |
|  TABLE ACCESS FULL        |T2        |     2K|    9K|     11 |       |       |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So next time you see a plan and the indentation doesn’t quite seem to make sense, perhaps a quick query to select the id and parent_id will let you check whether you’ve found an example where the depth calculation produces a misleading result.

 

Update 20th Oct 2014

A question via twitter – does the error also show up with dbms_xplan.display_cursor(), SQL tuning sets, AWR, etc. or is it just a defect of explain plan. Since the depth is (probably) a value derived for display purposes only that Oracle doesn’t use internally for executing the plan I would be inclined to assume that the defect is universal, but I’ve only checked it through explain/display(), and  execute/display_cursor().

 

Update 1st Dec 2021

Prompted by a question on the Oracle-L list server (with my comments here) I’ve just run the test case against 21.3.0.0, and the anomaly is still present. The depth column is not consistent with the values in the id/parent_id columns, leaving you with a distorted plan output.