CTEs and Updates

An important target of trouble-shooting, particularly when addressing performance problems, is to minimise the time and effort you have to spend to get a “good enough” result. A recent question on the OTN database forum struck me as a good demonstration of following this strategy; the problem featured a correlated update that had to access a view 84 times to update a small table; but the view was a complex view (apparently non-mergeable) and the update took several hours to complete even though the view, when instantiated, held only 63 rows.

The OP told us that the query “select * from view” took seven minutes to return those 63 rows, and wanted to know if we could find a nice way to perform the update in (approximately) that seven minutes, rather than using the correlated update approach that seemed to take something in the ballpark of 7 minutes per row updated.

Of course the OP could have given us all the details of the view definition, all the table and index definitions, with stats etc. and asked us if we could make the update run faster – but that could lead to a long and frustrating period of experimentation and testing, and a solution that might increase the general maintenance costs of the system (because a subsequent modification to the view might then have to be echoed into the code that did the update). Setting a strictly limited target that clearly ought to be achievable is (if nothing else) a very good starting point for improving the current situation.

I don’t know (as at the time of writing) if the OP implemented the strategy I suggested, but from his description it looked as if it should have been simple to use subquery factoring with materialization to achieve the required result in the most elegant way possible (meaning, in this case, simple SQL and no change to any surrounding code).

The OP has responded to my suggestion with a comment that “it didn’t work”, but it appeared to me that they were looking at and mis-interpreting the output from a call to “Explain Plan” rather than testing the query and pulling the plan from memory – so I thought I’d build a simple model to demonstrate the principle and show you how you could confirm (beyond just checking the clock) that the strategy had worked.

We start with a table to update, a non-mergeable view, and two tables to make up the non-mergeable view:

create table t1
as
select
        trunc((rownum-1)/15)    n1,
        trunc((rownum-1)/15)    n2,
        rpad(rownum,180)        v1
from
        dual
connect by
        level <= 3000
;


create table t2
as
select
        mod(rownum,200)         n1,
        mod(rownum,200)         n2,
        rpad(rownum,180)        v1
from
        dual
connect by
        level <= 3000;

create index t1_i1 on t1(n1);
create index t2_i1 on t2(n1);

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                user,
                't1',
                method_opt => 'for all columns size 1'
        );

        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                user,
                't2',
                method_opt => 'for all columns size 1'
        );
end;
/

create or replace view v1
as
select distinct
        t1.n1 t1n1, t1.n2 t1n2, t2.n2 t2n2
from
        t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = t2.n1
;

create table t3
as
select * from v1
;

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                user,
                't3',
                method_opt => 'for all columns size 1'
        );
end;
/

I’ve created the table t3 by copying the content of the view v1 and I’m going to update every row in t3 from v1; I gathered stats on t1 and t2 before creating the view and table simply to avoid the need for Oracle to do dynamic sampling as it created t3. Depending on your version of Oracle, of course, the stats collections might be redundant.

Having set the scene with the data, here’s the “original” code for doing the required update, followed by its execution plan (pulled from the memory of a 12.1.0.2 instance):

set serveroutput off
set linesize 180
set trimspool on

alter session set statistics_level = all;

spool cte_update

update t3
        set t2n2 = (
                select  v1.t2n2
                from    v1
                where   v1.t1n1 = t3.t1n1
                and     v1.t1n2 = t3.t1n2
        )
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(null,null,'allstats last'));

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | UPDATE STATEMENT                         |       |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:01.22 |   46745 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  UPDATE                                  | T3    |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:01.22 |   46745 |       |       |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL                      | T3    |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |       3 |       |       |          |
|   3 |   VIEW                                   | V1    |    200 |      1 |    200 |00:00:01.22 |   46332 |       |       |          |
|   4 |    SORT UNIQUE                           |       |    200 |      1 |    200 |00:00:01.21 |   46332 |  2048 |  2048 | 2048  (0)|
|   5 |     NESTED LOOPS                         |       |    200 |      1 |  45000 |00:00:01.11 |   46332 |       |       |          |
|   6 |      NESTED LOOPS                        |       |    200 |      1 |  45000 |00:00:00.34 |    1332 |       |       |          |
|*  7 |       TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    200 |      1 |   3000 |00:00:00.02 |     684 |       |       |          |
|*  8 |        INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    200 |     15 |   3000 |00:00:00.01 |     408 |       |       |          |
|*  9 |       INDEX RANGE SCAN                   | T2_I1 |   3000 |      1 |  45000 |00:00:00.11 |     648 |       |       |          |
|  10 |      TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID         | T2    |  45000 |      1 |  45000 |00:00:00.31 |   45000 |       |       |          |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   7 - filter("T1"."N2"=:B1)
   8 - access("T1"."N1"=:B1)
   9 - access("T2"."N1"=:B1)
       filter("T1"."N1"="T2"."N1")

Points to note from this execution plan: the VIEW operation at line 3 has started 200 times (there are 200 rows in table t3, the subquery runs once per row); and a simple measure of work done is the 46,745 buffer visits (of which, I can tell you, roughly 400 are current block gets) reported under Buffers in the top line of the plan.

It’s an interesting detail that although Oracle has pushed the correlation predicates inside the view (as shown by the predicate section for operations 7,8 and 9) it doesn’t report the operation at line 3 as “VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE”. It would be nice to see the explicit announcement of predicate pushing here, but that seems to be an expression reserved for pushing join predicates into views – fortunately we always check the predicate section, don’t we!

Now let’s see what the SQL and plan look like if we want Oracle to create the entire v1 result set and use that to update the t3 table.

update t3 
        set t2n2 = (
                with v0 as (
                        select
                                /*+ materialize */
                                t1n1, t1n2, t2n2
                        from v1
                )
                select
                        t2n2
                from
                        v0
                where   v0.t1n1 = t3.t1n1
                and     v0.t1n2 = t3.t1n2
        )
;

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name                       | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  | Writes |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | UPDATE STATEMENT            |                            |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.19 |    1185 |      1 |      1 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  UPDATE                     | T3                         |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.19 |    1185 |      1 |      1 |       |       |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL         | T3                         |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |       3 |      0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   3 |   TEMP TABLE TRANSFORMATION |                            |    200 |        |    200 |00:00:00.18 |     778 |      1 |      1 |       |       |          |
|   4 |    LOAD AS SELECT           |                            |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |     171 |      0 |      1 |  1040K|  1040K|          |
|   5 |     VIEW                    | V1                         |      1 |  45000 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |     168 |      0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   6 |      HASH UNIQUE            |                            |      1 |  45000 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |     168 |      0 |      0 |  1558K|  1558K| 3034K (0)|
|*  7 |       HASH JOIN             |                            |      1 |  45000 |  45000 |00:00:00.01 |     168 |      0 |      0 |  1969K|  1969K| 1642K (0)|
|   8 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL    | T1                         |      1 |   3000 |   3000 |00:00:00.01 |      84 |      0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   9 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL    | T2                         |      1 |   3000 |   3000 |00:00:00.01 |      84 |      0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|* 10 |    VIEW                     |                            |    200 |  45000 |    200 |00:00:00.17 |     603 |      1 |      0 |       |       |          |
|  11 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL       | SYS_TEMP_0FD9D6618_911FB4C |    200 |  45000 |  40000 |00:00:00.08 |     603 |      1 |      0 |       |       |          |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   7 - access("T1"."N1"="T2"."N1")
  10 - filter(("V0"."T1N1"=:B1 AND "V0"."T1N2"=:B2))

The headline figure to note is that 1,185 Buffer visits – clearly we’ve done something very different (and possibly cheaper and faster, even in this tiny demonstration). Looking at operation 3 we see the “TEMP TABLE TRANSFORMATION”, which tells us that we’ve materialized our factored subquery. There is scope, though, for a little ambiguity and uncertainty – the Starts column for this operation says we started it 200 times, once for each row in t3. We might worry that we’ve actually recreated the result and written it to disc 200 times even though we might then notice that lines 4 – 9 tell us that we loaded the temporary table just once (Starts = 1).

You could take my word for it that we didn’t “do” the temp table transformation 200 time, we merely used the result of the temp table transformation 200 times; but I wasn’t prepared to make this assumption until I had done a little more checking, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t still be a little suspicious. Lines 4 – 9 do seem to tell us (consistently) that we only load the data once, but there have been occasional bugs where counters have been reset to zero when they shouldn’t have been, so the fact that we see (for example, at operation 8) “1 full tablescan of t1 returning 3,000 rows after visiting 84 buffers” may mean that Oracle counted the work once and “forgot” to count it the other 199 times.

It’s easy enough to do a quick cross-check. Take a snapshot of v$mystat joined to v$statname before and after runnning the query, and check the difference in buffer visits, tablescans, and tablescan rows gotten – if those figures are broadly consistent with the figures in the execution plan I think we can be reasonably confident that the plan is telling us the truth.

Here’s what we get for a few key figures:

Name                                       Value
----                                       -----
session logical reads                      1,472
db block gets                                412
consistent gets                            1,060
consistent gets from cache                 1,060
db block changes                             410
table scans (short tables)                   205
table scan rows gotten                    46,213
table scan blocks gotten                     366

There are a number of oddities – not to mention version and feature dependent variations – in the numbers and a couple of discrepancies introduced by the code I was using to take the snapshot, but the “table scan rows gotten” figure is particularly easy to see in the execution plan:

46,213 = 3000 (t1) + 3000 (t2) + 200 (t3) + 200 * 200 (temp table)

With a small error the number of “table scans (short tables)” is also consistent with the plan Starts – and that’s perhaps the most important indicator, we scan t1 and t2 just once, and the temp table result 200 times. If we were creating the temp table 200 times we’d have to have done over 400 table scans (200 each for t1 and t2).

I won’t go into the details of how to compare the session logical I/O to the total Buffer gets for the plan – but the figures are in the right ballpark as far as matching is concerned – if the plan was deceiving us about the number of times the temporary table was created (rather than used) the session stats would have to report a figure more like 33,600 (200 * (84 + 84)) consistent gets.

Conclusion

We have managed to reduce the workload from “one view instantiation per row” to “one view instantiation” with a very small change to the SQL. In the case of the OP this should result in a small, easily comprehensible, change in the SQL statement leading to a drop in run-time from several hours to seven minutes – and maybe that’s good enough for the present.

Reference Script: cte_update.sql