Distributed Sequences

A request for help came up some time ago on ODC reporting a query that was hanging when it included a sequence.nextval. In fact the intial “query” was an “insert / select” with a select that was a join of two remote tables. Making the fairly automatic assumption that many people say “hanging” when they really mean “hasn’t finished yet” the first thought I had about the structure of the statement was that it was just a variation of the standard problem of distributed DML. I haven’t written anything previously about how using sequences can introduce the problem so here’s a note to demonstrate the issue and suggest a workaround:

We start with a database link and a few tables:

rem
rem     Script:         distributed_sequence.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          June 2019
rem     Purpose:        
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem             18.3.0.0
rem             12.2.0.1
rem

rem     create public database link orcl@loopback using 'orcl';

define m_target=orcl@loopback

create sequence s1 cache 10000;
select s1.nextval from dual;

create table t1
segment creation immediate
nologging
as
with generator as (
        select 
                rownum id
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4    -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        rownum                          id,
        rownum                          n1,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')             v1,
        lpad('x',100,'x')               padding
from
        generator       v1
;

create table t2
nologging
as
with generator as (
        select 
                rownum id
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4    -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        rownum                          id,
        rownum                          n2,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')             v2,
        lpad('x',100,'x')               padding
from
        generator       v1
;

create table t3(
        id1     number(6,0),
        id2     number(6,0),
        n0      number(6,0),
        n1      number(6,0),
        n2      number(6,0),
        v1      varchar2(10),
        v2      varchar2(10)
)
segment creation immediate
;

create or replace view v1 as
select
        t1.id id1,
        t2.id id2,
        t1.n1,
        t2.n2,
        t1.v1,
        t2.v2
from
        t1, t2
where
        t2.id = t1.id
;

The step to create a public database link (one of many in my original source) has to be run by a suitably privileged schema as a one-off event. The definition of the substitution variable m_target that I’ll be using as my database link (again with many possibilities in my original script) means I only have to edit my choice of database link once in my script as I change Oracle instances. You’ll notice I’ve done my usual trick of using a loopback database link to emulate a distributed system.

I’ve then created two populated tables and a third empty table that will be the target of an insert. I’ve also created a view that joins the first two tables and a sequence number that I’ve primed with a single call to nextval. When I get to the tests I’ll be using t1, t2 and v1 as if they had been created in the remote database (referenced through my loopback database link) while t3 and s1 will be local objects.

So let’s run a couple of statements and see what their execution plans look like:

set serveroutput off

prompt  =======================
prompt  Insert without sequence
prompt  =======================

insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2)
select
        t1.id,
        t2.id,
        0,
        t1.n1,
        t2.n2,
        t1.v1,
        t2.v2
from
        t1@&m_target    t1,
        t2@&m_target    t2
where
        t2.id = t1.id
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'-plan_hash'));

prompt  =======================
prompt  Insert WITH sequence
prompt  =======================

insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2)
select
        t1.id,
        t2.id,
        s1.nextval,
        t1.n1,
        t2.n2,
        t1.v1,
        t2.v2
from
        t1@&m_target    t1,
        t2@&m_target    t2
where
        t2.id = t1.id
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'-plan_hash'));
commit;

So we join t1 and t2, select a couple of columns, and insert into t3 without or with a call to s1.nextval – the local sequence. Here’s the output (with minor cosmetic changes) running this chunk of code under 19.3.0.0 (the effects are the same in 18.3.0.0 and 12.2.0.1):

=======================
Insert without sequence
=======================

10000 rows created.


SQL_ID  373nz810u3frv, child number 0
-------------------------------------
insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2) select  t1.id,  t2.id,
0,  t1.n1,  t2.n2,  t1.v1,  t2.v2 from  t1@orclpdb@loopback t1,
t2@orclpdb@loopback t2 where  t2.id = t1.id

-----------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name | Cost  | Inst   |IN-OUT|
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | INSERT STATEMENT         |      |     1 |        |      |
|   1 |  LOAD TABLE CONVENTIONAL | T3   |       |        |      |
|   2 |   REMOTE                 |      |       | ORCLP~ | R->S |
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Remote SQL Information (identified by operation id):
----------------------------------------------------
   2 - SELECT "A2"."ID","A1"."ID",0,"A2"."N1","A1"."N2","A2"."V1","A1"."
       V2" FROM "T1" "A2","T2" "A1" WHERE "A1"."ID"="A2"."ID" (accessing
       'ORCLPDB.LOCALDOMAIN@LOOPBACK' )

Note
-----
   - cpu costing is off (consider enabling it)


=======================
Insert WITH sequence
=======================

10000 rows created.


SQL_ID  8jg23arujnh01, child number 0
-------------------------------------
insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2) select  t1.id,  t2.id,
s1.nextval,  t1.n1,  t2.n2,  t1.v1,  t2.v2 from  t1@orclpdb@loopback
t1,  t2@orclpdb@loopback t2 where  t2.id = t1.id

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Inst   |IN-OUT|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | INSERT STATEMENT         |      |       |       |    54 (100)|          |        |      |
|   1 |  LOAD TABLE CONVENTIONAL | T3   |       |       |            |          |        |      |
|   2 |   SEQUENCE               | S1   |       |       |            |          |        |      |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN             |      | 10000 |   937K|    54   (8)| 00:00:01 |        |      |
|   4 |     REMOTE               | T1   | 10000 |   468K|    26   (4)| 00:00:01 | ORCLP~ | R->S |
|   5 |     REMOTE               | T2   | 10000 |   468K|    26   (4)| 00:00:01 | ORCLP~ | R->S |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T2"."ID"="T1"."ID")

Remote SQL Information (identified by operation id):
----------------------------------------------------
   4 - SELECT /*+ OPAQUE_TRANSFORM */ "ID","N1","V1" FROM "T1" "A2" (accessing
       'ORCLPDB.LOCALDOMAIN@LOOPBACK' )

   5 - SELECT /*+ OPAQUE_TRANSFORM */ "ID","N2","V2" FROM "T2" "A1" (accessing
       'ORCLPDB.LOCALDOMAIN@LOOPBACK' )

The key thing to notice is that when we want to insert the local sequence as a column in the select list Oracle breaks the hash join into two separate accesses to the remote database and pulls all the data we might need from the tables before trying to join them locally. When the query is “fully remote” the local database can let the remote database deal with the join, when the query is distributed – which is a side effect of introducing the sequence – the local site becomes the driving site and has to work out the least worst way of handling the join, which might be much slower than the remote join.  (It’s an odd little quirk that when the select is fully remote the optimizer thinks that it’s not using CPU costing. Possibly that’s because all the arithmetic happens somewhere else and the local cost of the query never gets above zero.)

This is one of those cases where we might work around the problem by creating a remote view to handle the join – hence the creation of the view v1; here’s a suitable statement and the resulting execution plan:

prompt  ==============================
prompt  Insert using view and sequence
prompt  ==============================

set serveroutput off

insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2)
select
        v1.id1,
        v1.id2,
        s1.nextval,
        v1.n1,
        v1.n2,
        v1.v1,
        v1.v2
from
        v1@&m_target v1
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'-plan_hash'));
commit;



==============================
Insert using view and sequence
==============================

10000 rows created.


SQL_ID  4tz0rrqt87nb8, child number 0
-------------------------------------
insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2) select  v1.id1,  v1.id2,
s1.nextval,  v1.n1,  v1.n2,  v1.v1,  v1.v2 from  v1@orclpdb@loopback v1

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Inst   |IN-OUT|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | INSERT STATEMENT         |      |       |       |    27 (100)|          |        |      |
|   1 |  LOAD TABLE CONVENTIONAL | T3   |       |       |            |          |        |      |
|   2 |   SEQUENCE               | S1   |       |       |            |          |        |      |
|   3 |    REMOTE                | V1   | 10000 |   937K|    27   (8)| 00:00:01 | ORCLP~ | R->S |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Remote SQL Information (identified by operation id):
----------------------------------------------------
   3 - SELECT /*+ OPAQUE_TRANSFORM */ "ID1","ID2","N1","N2","V1","V2" FROM "V1" "V1"
       (accessing 'ORCLPDB.LOCALDOMAIN@LOOPBACK' )

As you can see, the local optimizer doesn’t know enough about the remote view to be able to split it into components and make a mess of the execution plan, it simply sees a query against a “single table” and let’s the remote database worry about optimising it. But, of course, we don’t always have the luxury of being able to create objects on someone else’s database, so what’s the alternative?

Try rewriting the query to use an inline view with the /*+ no_merge() */ hint:

prompt  =======================================
prompt  Insert from a no-merge inline view with
prompt  a sequence.nextval in the outer query
prompt  ========================================

set serveroutput off

insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2)
select
        id1, id2, s1.nextval, n1, n2, v1, v2
from    (
        select  /*+ no_merge */
                t1.id   id1,    
                t2.id   id2,
                0       n0,
                t1.n1,
                t2.n2,
                t1.v1,
                t2.v2
        from
                t1@&m_target    t1,
                t2@&m_target    t2
        where
                t2.id = t1.id
        )       v1
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'-plan_hash'));
commit;


=======================================
Insert from a no-merge inline view with
a sequence.nextval in the outer query
========================================

10000 rows created.


SQL_ID  20z81g550tbsk, child number 0
-------------------------------------
insert into t3 (id1, id2, n0, n1, n2, v1, v2) select  id1, id2,
s1.nextval, n1, n2, v1, v2 from (  select /*+ no_merge */   t1.id id1,
 t2.id id2,   0 n0,   t1.n1,   t2.n2,   t1.v1,   t2.v2  from
t1@orclpdb@loopback t1,   t2@orclpdb@loopback t2  where   t2.id = t1.id
 ) v1

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Inst   |IN-OUT|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | INSERT STATEMENT         |      |       |       |    54 (100)|          |        |      |
|   1 |  LOAD TABLE CONVENTIONAL | T3   |       |       |            |          |        |      |
|   2 |   SEQUENCE               | S1   |       |       |            |          |        |      |
|   3 |    VIEW                  |      | 10000 |   937K|    54   (8)| 00:00:01 |        |      |
|   4 |     REMOTE               |      |       |       |            |          | ORCLP~ | R->S |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Remote SQL Information (identified by operation id):
----------------------------------------------------
   4 - SELECT /*+ NO_MERGE */ "A2"."ID","A1"."ID",0,"A2"."N1","A1"."N2","A2"."V1","A1"."V
       2" FROM "T1" "A2","T2" "A1" WHERE "A1"."ID"="A2"."ID" (accessing
       'ORCLPDB.LOCALDOMAIN@LOOPBACK' )

The hint has done exactly what we needed: it has passed the text of the inline view to the remote database for optimisation so the join happens remotely, and the sequence number is then included after the result set comes back from the remote database. The SQL is a little messier, of course, mostly thanks to the doubled appearance of the columns in the select list.

Summary

Using a local sequence in DML that accesses a remote database makes the optimizer treats the underlying query as a distributed query, and this may mean it can’t find an efficient execution path unless you do some re-engineering of the code. If you can manage to make an insert with a constant efficient then using that version of the code as an in-line no_merge view with one extra layer that brings the sequence into play may be all you need to do to make the DML operate efficiently.

use_nl_with_index

One of the less well-known hints is the hint /*+ use_nl_with_index() */  (link to 19c reference manual) which appeared in the 10g timeline, where the manuals supply the following description:

The USE_NL_WITH_INDEX hint will cause the optimizer to join the specified table to another row source with a nested loops join using the specified table as the inner table but only under the following condition. If no index is specified, the optimizer must be able to use some index with at least one join predicate as the index key. If an index is specified, the optimizer must be able to use that index with at least one join predicate as the index key.

It looks like a fairly redundant hint, really, since it could easily (and with greater safely, perhaps) be replaced by the pair /*+ use_nl(alias) index(alias) */ with some refinement on the index() hint that I’ve shown. In fact I think I’ve only ever seen the hint “in the wild” once, and that was in an internal view definition where it had been used incorrectly (see this recent update to a note on one of the dynamic performance views that I wrote a few years ago).

The note I’ve just referenced prompted me to take a closer look at the hint to see how accurate the definition was. Here’s a data set I created for testing:

rem
rem     Script:         use_nl_with_index.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Mar 2021
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem 

create table t1
as
with generator as (
        select 
                rownum id
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4    -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        rownum                          id,
        mod(rownum,10)                  n10,
        mod(rownum,1000)                n1000,
        mod(rownum,2000)                n2000,
        lpad(mod(rownum,1000),10,'0')   v1000,
        lpad('x',100,'x')               padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e5   -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

create table t2 as
select distinct
        n10, n1000, v1000
from
        t1
;

create index t1_i1000 on t1(n1000);
create index t1_i10_1000 on t1(n10,n1000);
create index t1_i2000 on t1(n2000);
create bitmap index t1_b1 on t1(n1000, n10);

I’ve set up the data to do a join between t2 and t1, and I’m going to hint a query to force the join order t2 -> t1, and thanks to the data pattern the default path should be a hash join. Once I’ve established the default path I’m going to use the use_nl_with_index() hint to see how it behaves with respect to the various indexes I’ve created. So here’s the query with the default path:

set autotrace traceonly explain

select  
        /*+ leading(t2 t1) */
        t1.*
from    t2, t1
where
        t2.n10 = 1
and     t1.n1000 = t2.n1000
;

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 2959412835

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      | 10000 |  1318K|   259   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN         |      | 10000 |  1318K|   259   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |   100 |   700 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |   100K|    12M|   252   (6)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T1"."N1000"="T2"."N1000")
   2 - filter("T2"."N10"=1)

Note
-----
   - this is an adaptive plan

So the join order is as required, and the default is a hash join. The join predicate is t1.n1000 = t2,n1000, and if you examine the indexes I’ve created you’ll see I’ve got

• t1_i1000 on t1(n1000) – the perfect index
• t1_i10_1000 on t1(n10, n1000) – which could be used for a skip scan
• t1_i2000 on t1(n2000) – which doesn’t include a suitable join predicate
• t1_b1 on t1(n1000, n10) – which is a bitmap index

So here are the first batch of tests – all rolled into a single statement with optional hints included:

select  
        /*+ 
                leading(t2 t1) 
                use_nl_with_index(t1) 
--              use_nl_with_index(t1 t1_i1000)
--              use_nl_with_index(t1(n1000))
        */
        t1.*
from    t2, t1
where
        t2.n10 = 1
and     t1.n1000 = t2.n1000
;


Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 3315267048

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                    | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |          | 10000 |  1318K| 10133   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                |          | 10000 |  1318K| 10133   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS               |          | 10000 |  1318K| 10133   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL         | T2       |   100 |   700 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | T1_I1000 |   100 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T1       |   100 | 12800 |   101   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter("T2"."N10"=1)
   4 - access("T1"."N1000"="T2"."N1000")

If I don’t specify an index the optimizer picks the best possible index; alternatively I can specify the index on (n1000) by name or by description and the optimizer will still use it. So what do I get if I reference the index on (n2000):

select  
        /*+ 
                leading(t2 t1) 
                use_nl_with_index(t1(n2000))
        */
        t1.*
from    t2, t1
where
        t2.n10 = 1
and     t1.n1000 = t2.n1000
;


Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 2959412835

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      | 10000 |  1318K|   259   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN         |      | 10000 |  1318K|   259   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |   100 |   700 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |   100K|    12M|   252   (6)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T1"."N1000"="T2"."N1000")
   2 - filter("T2"."N10"=1)

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 1 (U - Unused (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   3 -  SEL$1 / T1@SEL$1
         U -  use_nl_with_index(t1(n2000))

Note
-----
   - this is an adaptive plan

I’m back to the tablescan with hash join – and since I’m testing on 19.3.0.0 Oracle kindly tells me in the Hint Report that I have an unused hint: the one that can’t be used because the referenced index doesn’t have any columns that are join predicates.

So what about the skip scan option:

select  
        /*+ 
                leading(t2 t1) 
                use_nl_with_index(t1(n10, n1000))
--              use_nl_with_index(t1(n10))
--              index_ss(t1 (n10))
        */
        t1.*
from    t2, t1
where
        t2.n10 = 1
and     t1.n1000 = t2.n1000
;

Even though the index I’ve specified in the hint does contain a column in the join predicate the execution plan reports a full tablescan and hash join – unless I include an explicit index_ss() hint: but in that case I might as well have used the vanilla flavoured use_nl() hint. I did have a look at the 10053 (CBO) trace file for this example, and found that if I didn’t include the index_ss() hint the optimizer calculated the cost of using an index full scan (and no other option) for every single index on t1 before choosing the tablescan with hash join.

Finally, and without repeating the query, I’ll just note that when I referenced t1_b1 (n1000, n10) in the hint Oracle was happy to use the index in a nested loop join:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                     | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT              |       | 10000 |  1318K|  2182   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                 |       | 10000 |  1318K|  2182   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS                |       | 10000 |  1318K|  2182   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL          | T2    |   100 |   700 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    BITMAP CONVERSION TO ROWIDS|       |       |       |            |          |
|*  5 |     BITMAP INDEX RANGE SCAN   | T1_B1 |       |       |            |          |
|   6 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID | T1    |   100 | 12800 |  2182   (1)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   3 - filter("T2"."N10"=1)
   5 - access("T1"."N1000"="T2"."N1000")
       filter("T1"."N1000"="T2"."N1000")

Summary

The use_nl_with_index() hint generally works as described in the manuals – with the exception that it doesn’t consider an index skip scan as a valid option when trying to match the join predicate. That exception is one of those annoying little details that could waste a lot of your time.

Since it’s so easy to replace use_nl_with_index() with a pair of hints – including an index hint that could be an index_desc(), index_ss(), or index_combine() hint – I can’t come up with a good reason for using the use_nl_with_index() hint.

Index Hints

At the end of the previous post on index hints I mentioned that I had been prompted to complete a draft from a few years back because I’d been sent an email by Kaley Crum showing the optimizer ignoring an index_rs_asc() hint in a very simple query. Here, with some cosmetic changes, is the example he sent me.

rem
rem     Script: index_rs_kaley.sql
rem     Dated:  Dec 2020
rem     Author: Kaley Crum
rem
rem     Last tested
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

create table range_scan_me(
        one,
        letter 
)
compress
nologging
as
with rowgen_cte as (
        select  null
        from    dual
        connect by level <=  11315
)
select
        1 one,
        case 
                when rownum <=  64e5     then 'A'
                when rownum  =  64e5 + 1 then 'B'
                when rownum <= 128e5     then 'C' 
        end     letter
from 
        rowgen_cte a
cross join 
        rowgen_cte b 
where 
        rownum <= 128e5
;

create index one_letter_idx on range_scan_me(one, letter) nologging;

The table has 12.8 million rows. Of the two columns the first always holds the value 1, the second has one row holding the value ‘B’, and 6.4M rows each holding ‘A’ and ‘C’. On my laptop it took about 20 seconds to create the table and 26 seconds to create the index; using a total of roughly 376 MB (29,000 blocks for the index, 18,500 blocks for the (compressed) table).

Since this is running on 19,3 Oracle will have created basic statistics on the table and index as it created them. Significantly, though, the statistics created during data loading do note include histograms so the optimizer will not know that ‘B’ is a special case, all it knows is that there are three possible values for letter.

Time now to query the data:

et serveroutput off
alter session set statistics_level=all;

select 
        /*+ index_rs_asc(t1 (one, letter)) */ 
        letter, one
from 
        range_scan_me t1
where   one >= 1
and     letter = 'B'
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'hint_report allstats last'));

I’ve told the optimizer to use an index range scan, using the “description” method to specify the index I want it to use. The hint is definitely valid, and the index can definitely be used in this way to get the correct result. But here’s the execution plan:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation        | Name           | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |                |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       8 |      4 |
|*  1 |  INDEX SKIP SCAN | ONE_LETTER_IDX |      1 |   4266K|      1 |00:00:00.01 |       8 |      4 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("ONE">=1 AND "LETTER"='B' AND "ONE" IS NOT NULL
       filter("LETTER"='B')

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 1 (U - Unused (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1 -  SEL$1 / T1@SEL$1
         U -  index_rs_asc(t1 (one, letter))

The plan gives us two surprises: first it ignores (and reports that it is ignoring) a perfectly valid hint. Secondly it claims to be using an index skip scan even though the common understanding of a skip scan is that it will be used when “the first column of the index doesn’t appear in the where clause”.

We can infer that the plan is truthful because it has taken only 8 buffer visits to get the result – that’s probably a probe down to the (1,’B’) index entry, then another probe to see if the last index leaf block has any entries in it where column one is greater than 1.

But there are a couple of little oddities about this “ignoring the index” line. First, if we hadn’t hinted the query at all it would have done a tablescan, so the “index” bit of the hint is being obeyed even if the “rs” bit isn’t. Then there’s this:

select 
        /*+ index_rs_desc(t1 (one, letter)) */ 
        letter, one
from 
        range_scan_me t1
where   one >= 1
and     letter = 'B'
/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                  | Name           | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT           |                |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       8 |
|*  1 |  INDEX SKIP SCAN DESCENDING| ONE_LETTER_IDX |      1 |   4266K|      1 |00:00:00.01 |       8 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("ONE">=1 AND "LETTER"='B' AND "ONE" IS NOT NULL)
       filter("LETTER"='B')

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 1 (U - Unused (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1 -  SEL$1 / T1@SEL$1
         U -  index_rs_desc(t1 (one, letter))

If we change the index_rs_asc() to index_rs_desc(), the optimizer still ignores the “range scan” bit of the hint, but honours the “descending” bit – we get an index skip scan descending.

Of course this example is a very extreme case – nevertheless it is a valid example of the optimizer behaving in a way that doesn’t seem very user-friendly. If we add ‘outline’ to the format options for the call to dbms_xplan.display_cursor() we’ll find that the index_ss_asc() and index_ss_desc() hints have been substituted for our attempted index_rs_asc() and index_rs_desc().

So, if we really are confident that an index range scan would work a lot better than an index skip scan what could we do. We could try telling it to use an index (posibly even an index range scan ascending), but not to do an index skip scan. Let’s test that and include the Outline Information in the execution plan:

select 
        /*+ index(t1) no_index_ss(t1) */
        letter, one
from 
        range_scan_me t1
where   one >= 1
and     letter = 'B'
;


select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'hint_report allstats last outline'));


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation        | Name           | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |                |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.78 |   14290 |
|*  1 |  INDEX RANGE SCAN| ONE_LETTER_IDX |      1 |   4266K|      1 |00:00:00.78 |   14290 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
      DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
      ALL_ROWS
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$1")
      INDEX(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1" ("RANGE_SCAN_ME"."ONE" "RANGE_SCAN_ME"."LETTER"))
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("ONE">=1 AND "LETTER"='B' AND "ONE" IS NOT NULL)
       filter("LETTER"='B')

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 2
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1 -  SEL$1 / T1@SEL$1
           -  index(t1)
           -  no_index_ss(t1)

It worked – we can see the index range scan, and we can see in the Buffers column of the plan why an index range scan was a bad idea – it’s taken 14,290 buffer visits to get the right result. If you check the index size I mentioned further up the page (, and think about how I defined the data, you’ll realise that Oracle has started an index range scan at the leaf block holding (1,B’) – which is half way along the index – and then walked every leaf block from there to the end of the index in an attempt to find any index entries with column one greater than 1.

The other thing to notice here is that the hint in the Outline Information is given as:

INDEX(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1" ("RANGE_SCAN_ME"."ONE" "RANGE_SCAN_ME"."LETTER"))

This was the hint that appeared in the outline whether I used the index() hint or the index_rs_asc() hint in the query. Similarly, when I tried index_desc() or index_rs_desc() as the hint the outline reported index_desc() in both cases.

If I try adding just this hint to the query the plan goes back to a skip scan. It’s another case where the hints in the Outline Information (hence, possibly, an SQL Plan Baseline) don’t reproduce the plan that the outline claims to be describing.

Summary

Does Oracle ignore hints?

It looks as if the answer is still no, except it seems to think that a skip scan is just a special case of a range scan (and, from the previous article, a range scan is just a special case of a skip scan). So if you want to ensure that Oracle uses your preferred index strategy you may have to think about including various “no_index” hints to block the indexes you don’t want Oracle to use, and then no_index_ss() and no_index_ffs() to make sure it doesn’t use the wrong method for the index you do want to use. Even then you may find you don’t have quite enough options to block every index option that you’d like to block.

Hint Errors

This is a list of possible explanations of errors that you might see in the Hint Report section of an execution plan. It’s just a list of the strings extracted from a chunk of the 19.3 executable around the area where I found something I knew could be reported, so it may have some errors and omissions – but there are plenty of things there that might give you some idea why (in earlier versions of Oracle) you might have seen Oracle “ignoring” a hint:

internally generated hint is being cleared
hint conflicts with another in sibling query block
hint overridden by another in parent query block
conflicting optimizer mode hints
duplicate hint
all join methods are excluded by hints
index specified in the hint doesn't exist
index specified in hint cannot be parallelized
incorrect number of indexes for AND_EQUAL
partition view set up
FULL hint is same as INDEX_FFS for IOT
access path is not supported for IOT
hint on view cannot be pushed into view
hint is discarded during view merging
duplicate tables in multi-table hint
conditions failed for array vector read
same QB_NAME hints for different query blocks
rejected by IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
specified number must be positive integer
specified number must be positive number
specified number must be >= 0 and <= 1
hint is only valid for serial SQL
hint is only valid for slave SQL
hint is only valid for dyn. samp. query
hint is only valid for update join ix qry
opt_estimate() without value list
opt_estimate() with conflicting values spec
hint overridden by NO_QUERY_TRANSFORMATION
hinted query block name is too long
hinted bitmap tree wasn't fully resolved
bitmap tree specified was invalid
Result cache feature is not enabled
Hint is valid only for select queries
Hint is not valid for this query block
Hint cannot be honored
Pred reorder hint has semantic error
WITH_PLSQL used in a nested query
ORDER_SUBQ with less than two subqueries
conflicting OPT_PARAM hints
conflicting optimizer_feature_enable hints
because of _optimizer_ignore_parallel_hints
conflicting JSON_LENGTH hints

CBO Example

A little case study based on an example just in on the Oracle-L list server. This was supplied with a complete, working, test case that was small enough to understand and explain very quickly.

The user created a table, and used calls to dbms_stats to fake some statistics into place. Here, with a little cosmetic editing, is the code they supplied.

set serveroutput off
set linesize 180
set pagesize 60
set trimspool on

drop table t1 purge;

create table t1 (id number(20), v varchar2(20 char));
create unique index pk_id on t1(id);
alter table t1 add (constraint pk_id primary key (id) using index pk_id enable validate);
exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user, 't1');
 
declare
        srec               dbms_stats.statrec;
        numvals            dbms_stats.numarray;
        charvals           dbms_stats.chararray;
begin
  
        dbms_stats.set_table_stats(
                ownname => user, tabname => 't1', numrows => 45262481, numblks => 1938304, avgrlen => 206
        );

        numvals := dbms_stats.numarray (1, 45262481);
        srec.epc:=2;
        dbms_stats.prepare_column_values (srec, numvals);
        dbms_stats.set_column_stats (
                ownname => user, tabname => 't1', colname => 'id', 
                distcnt => 45262481, density => 1/45262481,
                nullcnt => 0, srec => srec, avgclen => 6
        );

        charvals := dbms_stats.chararray ('', '');
        srec.epc:=2;
        dbms_stats.prepare_column_values (srec, charvals);
        dbms_stats.set_column_stats(
                ownname => user, tabname => 't1', colname => 'v', 
                distcnt => 0,  density => 0, 
                nullcnt => 45262481, srec => srec, avgclen => 0
        );
        dbms_stats.set_index_stats( 
                ownname => user, indname =>'pk_id', numrows => 45607914, numlblks => 101513,
                numdist => 45607914, avglblk => 1, avgdblk => 1, clstfct => 33678879, indlevel => 2
        );
end;
/
 
variable n1 nvarchar2(32)
variable n2 number

begin
        :n1 := 'D';
        :n2 := 50;
end;
/
 

select 
        /*+ gather_plan_statistics */ 
        * 
from    ( 
        select  a.id col0,a.id col1
        from    t1 a
        where   a.v = :n1 
        and     a.id > 1
        order by 
                a.id 
        ) 
where 
        rownum <= :n2 
;
 
select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(null,null,'allstats last cost peeked_binds '));

From Oracle’s perspective the table has 45M rows, with a unique sequential key starting at 1 in the id column. The query looks like a pagination query, asking for 50 rows, ordered by id. But the in-line view asks for rows where id > 1 (which, initiall, means all of them) and applies a filter on the v column.

Of course we know that v is always null, so in theory the predicate a.v = :n1 is always going to return false (or null, but not true) – so the query will never return any data. However, if you read the code carefully you’ll notice that the bind variable v has been declared as an nvarchar2() not a varchar2().

Here’s the exection plan I got on an instance running 19.3 – and it’s very similar to the plan supplied by the OP:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                     | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT              |       |      1 |        |  3747 (100)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  1 |  COUNT STOPKEY                |       |      1 |        |            |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|   2 |   VIEW                        |       |      1 |     50 |  3747   (1)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T1    |      1 |    452K|  3747   (1)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  4 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN          | PK_ID |      0 |   5000 |    14   (0)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peeked Binds (identified by position):
--------------------------------------
   2 - :2 (NUMBER): 50

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter(ROWNUM<=:N2)
   3 - filter(SYS_OP_C2C("A"."V")=:N1)
   4 - access("A"."ID">1)

The question we were asked was this: “Why does the optimizer estimate that it will return 5,000 entries from the index range scan at operation4?”

The answer is the result of combining two observations.

First: In the Predicate Information you can see that Oracle has applied a character-set conversion to the original predicate “a.v = :n1” to produce filter(SYS_OP_C2C(“A”.”V”)=:N1). The selectivity of “function of something = bind value” is one of those cases where Oracle uses one of its guesses, in this case 1%. Note that the E-rows estimate for operation 3 (table access) is 452K, which is 1% of the 45M rows in the table.

In real life if you had optimizer_dynamic_sampling set at level 3, or had added the hint /*+ dynamic_sampling(3) */ to the query, Oracle would sample some rows to avoid the need for guessing at this point.

Secondly: the optimizer has peeked the bind variable for the rownum predicate, so it is optimizing for 50 rows (basically doing the arithmetic of first_rows(50) optimisation). The optimizer “knows” that the filter predicate at the table will eliminate all but 1% of the rows acquired, and it “knows” that it has to do enough work to find 50 rows in total – so it can calculate that (statistically speaking) it has to walk through 5,000 (= 50 * 100) index entries to visit enough rows in the table to end up with 50 rows.

Next Steps (left as exercise)

Once you’ve got the answer to the question “Why is this number 5,000?”, you might go back and point out that the estimate for the table access was 95 times larger than the estimate for the number of rowids selected from the index and wonder how that could be possible. (Answer: that’s just one of the little defects in the code for first_rows(n).)

You might also wonder what would have happened in this model if the bind variable n1 had been declared as a varchar2() rather than an nvarchar2() – and that might have taken you on to ask yet another question about what the optimizer was playing at.

Once you’ve modelled something that is a little puzzle there’s always scope for pushing the model a little further and learning a little bit more before you file the model away for testing on the next version of Oracle.

Between

Reading Richard Foote’s latest blog note about automatic indexing and “non-equality” predicates I was struck by a whimsical thought about how the optimizer handles “between” predicates. (And at the same time I had to worry about the whimsical way that WordPress treats “greater than” and “less than” symbols.)

It’s probably common knowledge that if your SQL has lines like this:

columnA between {constant1} and {constant2}

the optimizer will transform them into lines like these:

    columnA >= {constant1}
and columnA <= {constant2}

The question that crossed my mind – and it was about one of those little details that you might never look at until someone points it out – was this: “does the optimizer get clever about which constant to use first?”

The answer is yes (in the versions I tested). Here’s a little demonstration:

rem
rem     Script:         between.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Jan 2021
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem             12.2.0.1
rem

create table t1
as
select
        rownum  rn,
        ao.*
from
        all_objects ao
where
        rownum <= 50000
;

set autotrace traceonly explain

select  object_name
from    t1
where
        rn between 45 and 55
;


select  object_name
from    t1
where
        rn between 49945 and 49955
;


select  object_name
from    t1
where
        rn between 24945 and 24955
;

select  object_name
from    t1
where
        rn between 25045 and 25055
;

set autotrace off

All I’ve done is create a table with 50,000 rows and a column that is basically a unique sequence number between 1 and 50,000. Then I’ve checked the execution plans for a simple query for 11 rows based on the sequence value – but for different ranges of values.

Two of the ranges are close to the low and high values for the sequence; two of the ranges are close to, but either side of, the mid-point value (25,000) of the sequence. The big question is: “does the execution plan change with choice of range?”. The answer is Yes, and No.

No … because the only possible execution path is a full tablescan

Yes … because when you examine the plan properly you’ll notice a change in the Predicate Information. Here are the first two execution plans produced by the calls to dbms_xplan.display():

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 3617692013

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |      |    12 |   528 |   140   (5)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |    12 |   528 |   140   (5)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter("RN"<=55 AND "RN">=45)

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 3617692013

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |      |    12 |   528 |   140   (5)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |    12 |   528 |   140   (5)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter("RN">=49945 AND "RN"<=49955)

Notice how the order of the filter predicates has changed as we move from one end of the range to the other. The optimizer has decided do the test that is more likely to fail first, and the test that is more likely to succeed second (which means there won’t be many rows where it has to run both tests which will make a small difference in the CPU usage).

Picking out just the filter predicate line from the output for this script (host grep filter between.lst) you can see the same pattern appear when the values supplied are very close to the mid-point (25,000).

SQL> host grep filter between.lst
   1 - filter("RN"<=55 AND "RN">=45)
   1 - filter("RN">=49945 AND "RN"<=49955)
   1 - filter("RN"<=24955 AND "RN">=24945)
   1 - filter("RN">=25045 AND "RN"<=25055)

My code has used literal values to demonstrate an effect. It’s worth checking whether we would still see the same effect if we were using bind variables (and bind variable peeking were enabled). So here’s a little more of the script:

set serveroutput off

variable b1 number
variable b2 number

exec :b1 := 45
exec :b2 := 55

select
        /* low_test */
        object_name
from    t1
where
        rn between :b1 and :b2
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'basic +predicate'));

exec :b1 := 49945
exec :b2 := 49955

select
        /* high_test */
        object_name
from    t1
where
        rn between :b1 and :b2
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'basic +predicate'));
set serveroutput on

Since autotrace simply calls “explain plan” and doesn’t know anything about bind variables (treating them as unpeekable character strings) I’ve used code that executes the statements and pulls the plans from memory. Here are the results (with some of the script’s output deleted):

EXPLAINED SQL STATEMENT:
------------------------
select  /* low_test */  object_name from t1 where  rn between :b1 and :b2

Plan hash value: 3332582666

-----------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name |
-----------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |
|*  1 |  FILTER            |      |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |
-----------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter(:B2>=:B1)
   2 - filter(("RN"<=:B2 AND "RN">=:B1))


EXPLAINED SQL STATEMENT:
------------------------
select  /* high_test */  object_name from t1 where  rn between :b1 and :b2

Plan hash value: 3332582666

-----------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name |
-----------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |
|*  1 |  FILTER            |      |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |
-----------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter(:B2>=:B1)
   2 - filter(("RN">=:B1 AND "RN"<=:B2))

As you can see, when we query the low value the first comparison is made against :b2, when we query the high range the first comparison is made against :b1.

It is actually worth knowing that this can happen. How many times have you heard the question: “the plan’s the same, why is the performance different?”. Maybe the body of the plan looks the same and has the same plan_hash_value, but today the first person to execute the query supplied bind values that made the optimizer choose to apply the filters in the opposite order to usual. This probably won’t make much difference to CPU usage in most cases there are bound to be a few cases where it matters.

You’ll notice, by the way, that the plan with bind variables includes a FILTER operation that doesn’t appear in the plans with literal values. This is an example of “conditional SQL” – if you check the predicate information for operation 1 you’ll see that it’s checking that :b2 is greater than :b1, if this test doesn’t evaluate to true then operation 1 will not make a call to operation 2, i.e. the tablescan is in the plan but won’t happen at run-time.

(I believe that there may be some RDBMS which will treat (e.g.) “X between 20 and 10” as being identical to “X between 10 and 20” – Oracle doesn’t.)

Left as an exercise

The test data was created as a completely evenly spaced (by value) and evenly distributed (by count) set of values. How would things change if the data were sufficiently skewed that the optimizer would default to creating a histogram when gathering stats.

Left as another exercise**

There are lots of little bits of arithmetic that go into the CPU_COST component of an execution plan – including a tiny factor to allow for the number of columns that Oracle has to “step over” (by counting bytes) as it projects the columns needed by the query; so if you had a second “between” predicate on another column in the table, could you manage to get all 24 possible orders for the 4 transformed predicates by adjusting the ranges of the between clauses and/or moving the two columns to different positions in the row.

^** For those in lockdown who need something to do to fill the time.

Hash Joins

This is a follow-up to a note that’s 10 years old [opens in new tab], prompted by a thread on the Oracle Developer Community forum asking about the order of operation in an execution plan, and following up with a question about PGA memory use that I had left open in the original note.

The original note pointed out that the serial execution plan for a 4 table join that used hash joins for every join and had a leading() hint dictating a single join order could still have 8 distinct execution plans (which I then corrected to 4, because half of them were eliminated by an odd little inconsistency of the leading() hint).

The source of the number 8 was the fact that when you hint a hash join with /*+ use_hash(next_alias) */ the optimizer will consider a /*+ swap_join_inputs(next_alias) */ – in other words, it will choose which of the two inputs should be the “build” table and which the “probe” table, even though the human eye will probably assume that next_alias was clearly intended as the probe table. (The “little inconsistency” in the leading() hint is that it blocks the option for a swap for the first – and only the first – join unless it’s explicitly hinted.)

In the article I showed all 8 possible plans, and described how the two plans at the extreme ends of my list would operate at run-time. I’ve reproduced these two plans below, preceded by the hints that produced them:

leading(t1 t2 t3 t4)
use_hash(t2) no_swap_join_inputs(t2)
use_hash(t3) no_swap_join_inputs(t3)
use_hash(t4) no_swap_join_inputs(t4)
 
--------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |
--------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |      |     1 |    24 |    11 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |      |     1 |    24 |       |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN           |      |    70 |  1680 |    11 |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN          |      |    70 |  1260 |     8 |
|*  4 |     HASH JOIN         |      |    70 |   840 |     5 |
|   5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
|   6 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T3   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
|   8 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T4   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
--------------------------------------------------------------

leading(t1 t2 t3 t4)
use_hash(t2)    swap_join_inputs(t2)
use_hash(t3)    swap_join_inputs(t3)
use_hash(t4)    swap_join_inputs(t4)
 
--------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |
--------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |      |     1 |    24 |    11 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |      |     1 |    24 |       |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN           |      |    70 |  1680 |    11 |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T4   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
|*  4 |    HASH JOIN          |      |    70 |  1260 |     8 |
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T3   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
|*  6 |     HASH JOIN         |      |    70 |   840 |     5 |
|   7 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
|   8 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |    70 |   420 |     2 |
--------------------------------------------------------------

Side note: one of the comments on the original post raised the point that (e.g.) the second of the plans above could have been generated by the join order represented by the hint leading(t2 t1 t3 t4), and that’s absolutely correct. In fact, if you see the plan for a 4 table join consisting of nothing but 3 hash join you cannot be certain what join order the optimizer was examining when it produced that plan unless you look at the CBO trace file (or check to see if it’s been explicitly and completely, hinted in the code).

Having set the scene, we come to the question that prompted this note. The question related to the second plan above, and said:

“However, this one is the plan that takes the most memory in the PGA because it builds 3 hash tables before joining any table, right?”

The quick answer to the question is: “Not necessarily.”

In the original article I had pointed out that plans following the pattern of the first plan above with N tables and N – 1 joins would have at most two build tables in memory at any one moment while the bottom plan would create N – 1 build tables in memory before any join results could be created. This does rather invite the inference that the bottom plan has to be the one that is going to use most PGA memory, but what I had said in the original article was (emphasis added):

“Notice: the number of in-memory hash (build) tables we have in the first of the 8 plans at any instant after the first join starts is two and (no matter how many tables are involved in this pattern) the number of in-memory hash tables will always be two. The actual size of the two hash tables is a little unpredictable and, as a very crude guideline, you might expect the size to grow as more tables are joined into the result set.“

As a thought experiment, consider 3 small dimension tables and one big fact table. If Oracle were to create in-memory hash tables from the three dimension tables and then start scanning the fact table (following the pattern of the second plan above with t1 in the role of the fact table) probing each of the dimension tables in turn, it could deliver the first result row very quickly without requiring more memory to store intermediate results.

Conversely if Oracle were to create a tiny in-memory hash table from the first dimension and probe it with the fact table (following the pattern of the first plan above with t2 in the role of the fact table) Oracle would then have to build a very large in-memory hash table before before probing it with the second dimension table, and as that second join takes place it would be generating a new result set that would become the next big in-memory hash table.

In this thought experiment we would probably find that the optimizer did the right thing without prompting and constructed three tiny in-memory hash tables – but it’s not always so clear-cut, and even the “right” decision can result in very large intermediate build tables (and if those intermediate build tables spill to disc in an Exadata environment the change in performance can be huge).

To finish off, here’s a script to turn the thought experiment into a concrete example (by careful, but deliberately silly, hinting).

rem
rem     Script:         c_treblehash_3.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Dec 2020
rem     Purpose:        
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem 

create table t1 
as
select
        rownum          id,
        to_char(rownum) small_vc,
        rpad('x',100)   padding
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 70
;

alter table t1 
        add constraint t1_pk primary key(id)
;

create table t2
as
select
        rownum          id,
        to_char(rownum) small_vc,
        rpad('x',100)   padding
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 70
;

alter table t2
        add constraint t2_pk primary key(id)
;

create table t3
as
select
        rownum          id,
        to_char(rownum) small_vc,
        rpad('x',100)   padding
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 70
;

alter table t3
        add constraint t3_pk primary key(id)
;

create table t4
nologging
as
select
        t1.id                   id1,
        t2.id                   id2,
        t3.id                   id3,
        rpad(rownum,10)         small_vc,
        rpad('x',100)           padding
from
        t1, t2, t3
;

connect test_user/test
set linesize 156
set serveroutput off

select
        /*+ 
                leading(t4 t1 t2 t3)
                full(t4) 
                use_hash(t1) full(t1) swap_join_inputs(t1)
                use_hash(t2) full(t2) swap_join_inputs(t2)
                use_hash(t3) full(t3) swap_join_inputs(t3) 
        */
        count(t1.small_vc),
        count(t2.small_vc),
        count(t3.small_vc),
        count(t4.small_vc)
from
        t4,     
        t1,     
        t2,     
        t3
where
        t1.id = t4.id1
and     t2.id = t4.id2
and     t3.id = t4.id3
;

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

column pga_max_mem format 99,999,999

select pga_max_mem from v$process where addr = (
                select paddr from v$session where sid = (
                        select sid from V$mystat where rownum = 1
                )
        )
;

connect test_user/test
set linesize 156
set serveroutput off

select
        /*+ 
                leading(t4 t1 t2 t3)
                full(t4) 
                use_hash(t1) full(t1) no_swap_join_inputs(t1)
                use_hash(t2) full(t2) no_swap_join_inputs(t2)
                use_hash(t3) full(t3) no_swap_join_inputs(t3) 
        */
        count(t1.small_vc),
        count(t2.small_vc),
        count(t3.small_vc),
        count(t4.small_vc)
from
        t4,     
        t1,     
        t2,     
        t3
where
        t1.id = t4.id1
and     t2.id = t4.id2
and     t3.id = t4.id3
;

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

column pga_max_mem format 99,999,999

select pga_max_mem from v$process where addr = (
                select paddr from v$session where sid = (
                        select sid from V$mystat where rownum = 1
                )
        )
;

All I’ve done is create three small “dimension” tables of 70 rows each then created a table which is their Cartesian join, which produces a “fact” table of 343,000 rows. Then I’ve written a simple query to join the three dimension tables to the fact table.

I’ve used swap_join_inputs() for all the joins in one version of the query, and no_swap_join_inputs() in the other versions; and I’ve reconnected to the data before running each query to make it easier to see the different impact on the PGA of the two plans.

I’ve use dbms_xplan.display_cursor() to pull the execution plans from memory after running the queries, and since I’ve not set statistics_level to all, or added the hint /*+ gather_plan_statistics */ to the queries the only rowsource execution statistics I’ll get are the PGA usage: estimates and actuals.

The final step of each test reports the maximum PGA memory usage the session reached in the course of the test.

Here are the two plans, each followed by the PGA maximum memory size.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name | E-Rows |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |      |        |       |       |          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |      |      1 |       |       |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN           |      |    343K|  2171K|  2171K| 1684K (0)|
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T3   |     70 |       |       |          |
|*  4 |    HASH JOIN          |      |    343K|  2171K|  2171K| 1681K (0)|
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T2   |     70 |       |       |          |
|*  6 |     HASH JOIN         |      |    343K|  2171K|  2171K| 1711K (0)|
|   7 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |     70 |       |       |          |
|   8 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T4   |    343K|       |       |          |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("T3"."ID"="T4"."ID3")
   4 - access("T2"."ID"="T4"."ID2")
   6 - access("T1"."ID"="T4"."ID1")

PGA_MAX_MEM
-----------
 13,859,925

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name | E-Rows |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |      |        |       |       |          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |      |      1 |       |       |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN           |      |    343K|    23M|  3727K|   29M (0)|
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN          |      |    343K|    23M|  3727K|   29M (0)|
|*  4 |     HASH JOIN         |      |    343K|    23M|  3667K|   29M (0)|
|   5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T4   |    343K|       |       |          |
|   6 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |     70 |       |       |          |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T2   |     70 |       |       |          |
|   8 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T3   |     70 |       |       |          |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("T3"."ID"="T4"."ID3")
   3 - access("T2"."ID"="T4"."ID2")
   4 - access("T1"."ID"="T4"."ID1")

PGA_MAX_MEM
-----------
 52,984,917

As you can see, each of the hash joins in the first plan required roughly 1.7MB of memory. All three hash tables would have been in existence at the same time, giving a total of about 5.1MB of memory for the query. The session’s maximum PGA usage shows up as 13MB, of which 5MB was my basic “startup” PGA, leaving 3MB “unaccounted”.

In comparison, each of the hash joins in the second plan required roughly 29MB, although only two of the hash tables would have been in existence at any one moment. That’s still an allocation of 58MB for the same basic 4 table join. In fact things aren’t quite as bad as they seem in this case since the maximum PGA allocated was only about 52MB (again with 5MB of startup PGA). The apparent contradiction may be due to the way that Oracle allocates PGA in increasing chunks – the 29MB reported may have been the result of the session doing something like: “I’ve reached 23MB, my next allocation will be 4MB, oops, I only needed another 128KB)”

As a final check of activity, I’ve also run a couple of queries against V$sql_workarea – a convenient memory structure you can examine to get some “recent history” of queries that have been using large amount of memory, or spilling to disc. In this case I’ve query the structure by sql_id for the two queries, reporting just a little detail about the last execution and memory usage.

SQL> select operation_id, operation_type, last_memory_used, last_execution  from V$sql_workarea where sql_id = 'dcc01q28gcbmy';

OPERATION_ID OPERATION_TYPE                   LAST_MEMORY_USED LAST_EXECUTION
------------ -------------------------------- ---------------- ----------------------------------------
           2 HASH-JOIN                                 1724416 OPTIMAL
           4 HASH-JOIN                                 1721344 OPTIMAL
           6 HASH-JOIN                                 1752064 OPTIMAL


SQL> select operation_id, operation_type, last_memory_used, last_execution  from V$sql_workarea where sql_id = 'b52uwjz07fwhk';

OPERATION_ID OPERATION_TYPE                   LAST_MEMORY_USED LAST_EXECUTION
------------ -------------------------------- ---------------- ----------------------------------------
           2 HASH-JOIN                                30930944 OPTIMAL
           3 HASH-JOIN                                30945280 OPTIMAL
           4 HASH-JOIN                                30650368 OPTIMAL

As you can see, the view reports each plan operation (with id and type) that needed memory for an SQL workarea – and the numbers confirm the 1.7MB and 29MB reported by the execution plans. (Which is not surprising since it’s exactly these figures that are used to supply the details in the plans.)

You need to be a little cautious with this view in older versions of Oracle – it used to do a “full tablescan” of the library cache, which resulted in a lot of library cache latch activity and could cause some contention if you ran it frequently, but it’s a very useful view for finding queries that are doing unexpectedly large sorts or hash joins, and one you might query occasionally if you see any space management threats in the temporary tablespace.

rowsets

Here’s a little demonstration of the benefit of rowsets. It started with a very simple question that arrived in my in-box from Kaley Crum.

• “Why does the query with the UNION ALL take so much longer than the query without the UNION ALL?”

Here are the two queries – surely they should take virtually the same amount of time.

select count(*)
from (select /*+ no_merge */
             object_id
      from drop_me);


select count(*)
from (select /*+ no_merge */
             object_id
      from drop_me
      --
      union all
      --
      select 1 from dual);

Look closely – the difference between the two queries is just the addition through a UNION ALL of “select 1 from dual”. The first query took about 3.5 seconds to complete (there were 70M rows in the table), and the second took nearly 69 seconds.

Here are the execution plans showing the rowsource execution statistics (and Query Block // Object Alias information) – first the baseline query:

QL_ID  0ph1vfuuxkbqb, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select count(*) from (select /*+ no_merge */              object_id    
  from drop_me)
 
Plan hash value: 3609429292
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| E-Time   | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |         |      1 |        | 26465 (100)|          |      1 |00:00:03.34 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE     |         |      1 |      1 |            |          |      1 |00:00:03.34 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   2 |   VIEW              |         |      1 |     70M| 26465   (2)| 00:00:02 |     70M|00:00:03.32 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| DROP_ME |      1 |     70M| 26465   (2)| 00:00:02 |     70M|00:00:03.27 |   95896 |  95891 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$1
   2 - SEL$2 / from$_subquery$_001@SEL$1
   3 - SEL$2 / DROP_ME@SEL$2

And then the UNION ALL query:

SQL_ID  0chdajr28y0ub, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select count(*) from (select /*+ no_merge */              object_id    
  from drop_me       --       union all       --       select 1 from
dual)
 
Plan hash value: 3408528233
 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| E-Time   | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |         |      1 |        | 26467 (100)|          |      1 |00:01:18.58 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |         |      1 |      1 |            |          |      1 |00:01:18.58 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   2 |   VIEW               |         |      1 |     70M| 26467   (2)| 00:00:02 |     70M|00:01:10.84 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   3 |    UNION-ALL         |         |      1 |        |            |          |     70M|00:00:53.13 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| DROP_ME |      1 |     70M| 26465   (2)| 00:00:02 |     70M|00:00:19.28 |   95896 |  95891 |
|   5 |     FAST DUAL        |         |      1 |      1 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$1
   2 - SET$1 / from$_subquery$_001@SEL$1
   3 - SET$1
   4 - SEL$2 / DROP_ME@SEL$2
   5 - SEL$3 / DUAL@SEL$3

This is not a trick question – I’ve got the SQL to create the data set and run the test; and I’ve run the test through 19.3.0.0 and 12.2.0.1 with results very similar to the above. Here’s a slightly modified version of the script – you’ll notice the column name has changed because I’ve used my usual “large data set” generator rather than scaling up a clone of all_objects:

rem
rem     Script:         rowset_kaley.sql
rem     Author:         Kaley Crum / JP Lewis
rem     Dated:          Oct 2020
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

create table drop_me
pctfree 0
nologging
as
with generator as (
        select
                rownum id
        from dual
        connect by
                level <= 1e4    -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        rownum  n1
from
        generator
cross join
        generator
where rownum <= 7e7
;

alter session set statistics_level = all;

set timing on
set serveroutput off

prompt  ===========================================
prompt  Baseline: Simple query without a union all.
prompt  Runs in 3-4 seconds
prompt  ===========================================

select
         count(*)
from (select /*+ no_merge */
             n1
      from drop_me);

select *
from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format => 'allstats last advanced'));

prompt  ==========================================
prompt  Add a UNION ALL for one record from dual.
Prompt  Runs in over a minute
prompt  ==========================================

pause Press return

select
         count(*)
from (select /*+ no_merge */
             n1
      from drop_me
      --
      union all
      --
      select 1 from dual);

select *
from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format => 'allstats last advanced'));

There are two factors involved in the massive variation in performance. The first factor is one that the test case will report – though I didn’t show it in the output above, the second is that the test case has enabled rowsource execution statistics.

Here’s the big clue – from the Column Projection Information, which is one of the things that appears with the “advanced” format option (or when you add the “projection” format option) in the call to dbms_xplan.display_xxx()

First for the fast query:

Column Projection Information (identified by operation id):
-----------------------------------------------------------
   1 - (#keys=0) COUNT(*)[22]
   2 - (rowset=1019)
   3 - (rowset=1019)

The rowsource passes 1,019 rows at a time from the tablescan operation to the view operation and from the view operation to the sort operation, for a total of roughly 70,000 calls for each of those two steps of the plan.

Compare this to the projection information for the slow UNION ALL query:

Column Projection Information (identified by operation id):
-----------------------------------------------------------
   1 - (#keys=0) COUNT(*)[22]

I haven’t missed a bit in copying – this really is it. The rows move up the stack one at a time, not in a rowset array. That’s 70,000,000 subroutime calls for each of the two steps of the plan.

I’m sure most of us have heard the mantra “row by row is slow by slow” (or some variant on the theme). This is true all the way down to the internal levels of an execution plan.

Of course 70M calls vs. 70K calls shouldn’t really explain a difference of more than 60 seconds – but when the calls to the O/S for timing information for rowsource execution stats are repeated for each call (or even if it’s only a 1% sample of the calls) down the stack that’s where a lot of time can disappear.

On my laptop, running Oracle 19.3 in a VM, this is how my timing went:

• Fast query: 1.94 seconds, dropping to 1.79 seconds when I disabled rowsource execution stats.
• Slow query: 65.91 seconds, dropping to a far less astounding 3.26 seconds when I disabled rowsource execution stats.

So there really is a noticeable difference between row-by-row and array-processing but most of the difference in the original test came from using rowsource execution statistics to measure how much of a difference there would be.

It’s also worth mentioning that this is probably the most extreme case you could produce to show the difference – using the largest possible rowset size with the smallest possible rows when you want to mazimise the gap between (internal) array processing and single row processing – and then processing a very large number of rows. [But isn’t ridiculously large numbers of rows what you do with Exadata?].

If you want further evidence that the difference is due to the rowset size you can always alter session set “_rowsets_enabled”=false; and watch the fast query slow down. It will take about half the time of the slow query as it only has to pass 70M rows up one step of the plan rather than the two steps that are in the UNION ALL plan.

In theory it looks as if you could also restrict the size of the rowset by setting _rowsets_max_rows or _rowsets_target_maxsize, but since the default value for the former is 256 the results above suggest that the settings might be ignored, and when I tried adjusting them at the session level nothing changed.

Another test you could run is to adjust (alter session) the parameter “_rowsource_statistics_sampfreq”, When I set this to 100 the time for the slow query dropped to about 21 seconds (and the fast query – with rowsets disabled – dropped to about 11 seconds).

Footnote

It’s always easy to hit an accidental special case without realising it, so when you’re testing something it’s important to think about what’s special in the example. I came up with two possibilities in this case – dual is always going to be a very special case in any circumstances, and I’ve got a table in my query that is guaranteed to return exactly one row. So I repeated the test with:

• a real table with one row and primary key in case the reference to dual was disabling rowsets
• a real table with 100 rows in case this enabled a rowset size of 100

In neither case did Oracle start using array processing.

Footnote 2

One of the patterns I see occasionally follows the form of the slow query above. Some front-end tool executes a select statement that starts with a select {list of desired column headings} from dual so that the front-end code doesn’t have to be programmed to create headings as it receives the data.

Although the impact this would have on rowsets looks like a large percentage of the work done in the database in this case, in more realistic cases it would probably be irrelevant, until someone starts testing with the statistics_level set to all, or _rowsource_execution_statistics explicitly enabled.

There is a related effect, though, from the SQL Monitor feature (which activates automatically for a statement if it’s executing in parallel, or if it’s predicted to take more than 5 seconds to complete). When I added the /*+ monitor */ hint to the two queries (and didn’t fiddle with the rowsets parameter) the fast query averaged 2.26 seconds instead of 1.79 seconds, and the slow query averaged 3.51 seconds instead of 3.26 seconds. I have to say, though, that the variation between executions of the same statement was quite significant compared the variation produced by adding or eliminating the hint.

I wish

Here’s a lovely little mechanism new to Postgres 13 that can minimise sorting costs: the “incremental sort”. It would be nice to see it in Oracle as well as it could make an enormous difference to “fetch first N” queries.

The concept is simple – if a rowsource moving up a plan is known to be in “partially sorted” order when it reaches a sort operation the optimizer can choose whether or not to sort the entire rowsource in one go or to sort it in batches as it arrives.

For example if you have a query which has “order by cola, colb” as its final clause and the plan has used an index range scan on an index on just (cola) then the “sort order by” operation can accept the rows for the first value of cola, sort them by colb and pass them on, then accept the rows for the second value of cola, sort them by colb and pass them on, and so on.

Better still, if you have an “order by table1.colA, table2,colB” and the optimizer used an indexed access path on table1.colA and a nested loop into table2, then the optimizer will still recognize that the generated data is already partially sorted, and sort batches for table1.colA to order them by table2.colB. (Oracle has a mechanism for dealing with sorted hash clusters that is roughly similar.)

Obviously the benefit is that you avoid doing a very large sort that might spill to disc; slightly less obviously is that you might avoid sorting the whole data set if you have a “fetch first N” query. Here’s an Oracle model setting up a demonstration of the principle:

rem
rem     Script:         fetch_first_postgres_2.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Oct 2020
rem

create table t1 as
with generator(id) as (
        select 1 from dual
        union all
        select id + 1 from generator where id < 1e5
)
select
        ceil(id/10)             n1,
        mod(id,13)              n2,
        lpad(id,10)             small_vc,
        rpad('x',50,'x')        padding
from
        generator
/

alter table t1 modify n1 not null;

explain plan for
select  * 
from    t1
where   n1 between 25 and 30
order by
        n1, n2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

create index t1_i1 on t1(n1);

explain plan for
select  * 
from    t1
where   n1 between 25 and 30
order by
        n1, n2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

drop index t1_i1;
create index t1_i1 on t1(n1, n2);

explain plan for
select  * 
from    t1
where   n1 between 25 and 30
order by
        n1, n2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

I’ve created a table with 100,000 rows where the value of n1 is repeated 10 times and well-clustered, while for each value of n1, the n2 column has 10 distinct values (not necessarily in order thanks to the mod(,13)). Using this data set I’ve executed the same query three times – selecting the rows for 6 consecutive values of n1, ordering by n1, n2.

The first test will have to do a tablescan, the second can use the index I’ve created on (n1) but will have to do a sort (after visiting the table), the third can walk the index I’ve created on (n1,n2) and complete without sorting.

Here, in order, are the three execution plans:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |    70 |  4830 |   145   (9)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT ORDER BY     |      |    70 |  4830 |   145   (9)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |    70 |  4830 |   144   (8)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("N1"<=30 AND "N1">=25)


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |    70 |  4830 |     4  (25)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT ORDER BY                       |       |    70 |  4830 |     4  (25)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    70 |  4830 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    70 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("N1">=25 AND "N1"<=30)


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |       |    70 |  4830 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T1    |    70 |  4830 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   INDEX RANGE SCAN          | T1_I1 |    70 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("N1">=25 AND "N1"<=30)

Having created the Oracle model I asked Phil Florent (who had prompted this note by emailing me with a question about why Postgres 13 was executing a “Fetch First” so much faster than Oracle 19 (the basic answer is at this URL) if he would run it under Postgres and send me the execution plans.

The code required two changes – the first to handle the change in dialect, the second to supply a change in scale because my model produced such a small output that Postgres didn’t bother to use the new feature. Here’s the modified SQL to generate the original test data:

create table t1 as
with recursive generator(id) as (
        select 1
        union all
        select id + 1 from generator where id < 1e5
)
select
        ceil(id/10)             n1,
        mod(id,13)              n2,
        lpad(id::text,10)       small_vc,
        rpad('x',50,'x')        padding
from
        generator;

And the three plans (so that you can compare the content and style of output with Oracle plans) that went with this small data set – first the no-index plan, then the plan for the (n1) index, then the plan with (n1,n2) indexed:

                                               QUERY PLAN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sort  (cost=2835.85..2836.00 rows=62 width=74) (actual time=19.534..19.600 rows=60 loops=1)
   Sort Key: n1, n2
   Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 33kB
   ->  Seq Scan on t1  (cost=0.00..2834.00 rows=62 width=74) (actual time=0.067..19.417 rows=60 loops=1)
         Filter: ((n1 >= '25'::double precision) AND (n1 <= '30'::double precision))
         Rows Removed by Filter: 99940

Planning Time: 0.351 ms
Execution Time: 19.703 ms


                                                    QUERY PLAN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sort  (cost=11.50..11.66 rows=62 width=74) (actual time=0.224..0.289 rows=60 loops=1)
   Sort Key: n1, n2
   Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 33kB
   ->  Index Scan using t1_i1 on t1  (cost=0.42..9.66 rows=62 width=74) (actual time=0.024..0.113 rows=60 loops=1)
         Index Cond: ((n1 >= '25'::double precision) AND (n1 <= '30'::double precision))

Planning Time: 0.665 ms
Execution Time: 0.391 ms



                                                 QUERY PLAN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Index Scan using t1_i1 on t1  (cost=0.42..114.66 rows=62 width=74) (actual time=0.022..0.155 rows=60 loops=1)
   Index Cond: ((n1 >= '25'::double precision) AND (n1 <= '30'::double precision))

Planning Time: 0.690 ms
Execution Time: 0.259 ms
 

As you can see, there’s very little difference between Oracle’s plans and Postgres’ plans in this example. (Though it’s rather nice to see what extra details appear in the Postgres plans, which were generated with the equivalent of Oracle’s “statistics_level = all” setting.

The middle plan shows us that Postgres didn’t use the “incremental sort” – but it’s useful to see it anyway so that we can compare the structure of the plan when we increase the volume of data – which the following script is for:

create table t2 as
with recursive generator(id) as (
        select 1
        union all
        select id + 1 from generator where id < 10000000
)
select
        ceil(id/10)             n1,
        mod(id,13)              n2,
        lpad(id::text,10)             small_vc,
        rpad('x',50,'x')        padding
from
        generator;
 
create index t2_i1 on t2(n1);

explain analyze
select  *
from    t2
where   n1 between 25000 and 30000
order by
        n1, n2
;

analyze t2;

Now we have 10M rows, still with 10 rows per value of n1, and our query requests 5,001 values of n1, so 50,010 rows in total. With that much data the optimizer decided to use the incremental sort rather than sorting the whole result set in one go:

                                                         QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Incremental Sort  (cost=0.49..4532.57 rows=52677 width=74) (actual time=0.160..164.125 rows=50010 loops=1)
   Sort Key: n1, n2
   Presorted Key: n1
   Full-sort Groups: 1251  Sort Method: quicksort  Average Memory: 30kB  Peak Memory: 30kB
   ->  Index Scan using t2_i1 on t2  (cost=0.43..2339.97 rows=52677 width=74) (actual time=0.055..61.663 rows=50010 loops=1)
         Index Cond: ((n1 >= '25000'::double precision) AND (n1 <= '30000'::double precision))
Planning Time: 0.197 ms
Execution Time: 204.490 ms

Note, particularly, the “Presorted Key” line leading to the “Sort Key” line. We can also check the plan without the incremental sort with a set command to disable the feature:

set enable_incremental_sort = off;

                                                         QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sort  (cost=8812.64..8944.33 rows=52677 width=74) (actual time=181.487..227.735 rows=50010 loops=1)
   Sort Key: n1, n2
   Sort Method: external merge  Disk: 4128kB
   ->  Index Scan using t2_i1 on t2  (cost=0.43..2339.97 rows=52677 width=74) (actual time=0.070..74.975 rows=50010 loops=1)
         Index Cond: ((n1 >= '25000'::double precision) AND (n1 <= '30000'::double precision))
Planning Time: 0.239 ms
Execution Time: 266.325 ms

Comparing the times for these two queries there isn’t really much difference – but you will notice that the old approach has had to dump 4MB to disc while the incremental sorts gets the job done in 30Kb of memory, which may be an important difference in other circumstances.

More importantly than a tiny time difference in this trivial example is the fact that Phil Florent’s original question was:

“Why is this two-table join with ‘fetch first 5’ taking 28 seconds to complete in Oracle when it takes less than one millisecond to complete in Postgres?”

The answer was:

• Oracle is doing a hash join that produces a 25M row result set, sorting it to do an analytic row_number() call to get the first 5 rows.
• Postgres is doing a nested loop join, fetching the first row(s) from the first table in the right order by index range scan then fetching the matching rows from the second table – then doing an incremental sort on those rows; then fetching the next row(s) and repeating the process – stopping after it’s got through a total of 5 rows instead of generating and sorting 25M rows.

Here’s the plan (with obfuscated table names):

                                                    QUERY PLAN                                                    

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Limit  (cost=284.36..287.21 rows=5 width=10)
   ->  Incremental Sort  (cost=284.36..14261803.18 rows=25000000 width=10)
         Sort Key: table1.col1 DESC, table2.col2 DESC
         Presorted Key: table1.col1
         ->  Nested Loop  (cost=1.00..13294209.39 rows=25000000 width=10)
               ->  Index Scan using table1_col1_idx on table1  (cost=0.56..1300593.47 rows=25000000 width=8)
               ->  Index Scan using table2.pk_col on table2 (cost=0.43..0.48 rows=1 width=6)
                     Index Cond: (id = table1.id)

You’ll notice in this exanple that the incremental sort can take advantage of the optimizer’s knowledge of the index definitions whether the sort is ascending or descending.

You’ll also notice that Postgres has the same problem as Oracle when it comes to coping with Fetch First (or, in Oracle’s case, rownum <= N and optimizer_mode = first_rows_N). Even when it “knows” that a query is going to stop fetching data very early the plan still reports 25M rows as the expected volume of data.

Summary

Postgres 13 has a wonderful mechanism for optimising sorts that can make a huge difference to “first rows” queries and even basic “order by” clauses involving join query result sets.

Footnote

Browsing the Internet for documentation and comment on the incremental sort I found the following. Given my level of ignorance about Postgres I can’t comment on the completeness or correctness of the information, but it looked good to me, and I found its comments about this feature very informative.

Interval Oddity

Interval partitioning is a popular strategy for partitioning date-based data. It’s an enhanced variant of range partitioning that allows you to define a starting partition and an interval that should be used to derive the high values for all subsequent partitions – and Oracle doesn’t even have to create intervening partitions if you insert data that goes far beyond the current partition, it automatically creates exactly the right partition (with the correct high_value and correctly inferred lower boundary) for the incoming data and behaves as if the intervening partitions will become available when they’re needed at some later point in time. So no need for DBAs to work out actual partition high_values, no need to ensure that all the partitions you need out into the future have been pre-created, no more batch processes crashing with Oracle error ORA-14400: inserted partition key does not map to any partition.

But there’s a surprising difference between traditional range partitioning and the newer interval partitioning that will increase CPU usage in some cases and may (though I haven’t yet investigated this in sufficient detail to create an example) lead to variations in execution plans.

To demonstrate the difference I’m going to create two tables with the same structure and content then run the same query against them and show you the resulting execution plans. Here’s the code to create and populate the tables:

rem
rem     Script:         interval_or_range.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Oct 2020
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem


create table t_interval(
        order_date      date not null,
        order_id        number(10,0) not null,
        small_vc        varchar2(10),
        padding         varchar2(100)
)
partition by range (order_date) 
interval (numtoyminterval(1,'MONTH'))
subpartition by hash (order_id) subpartitions 4
        (
                partition start_p1 values less than (to_date('01-Jan-2020','dd-mon-yyyy'))
        )
;

create table t_range(
        order_date      date not null,
        order_id        number(10,0) not null,
        small_vc        varchar2(10),
        padding         varchar2(100)
)
partition by range (order_date) 
subpartition by hash (order_id) subpartitions 4
        (
                partition start_p1 values less than (to_date('01-Jan-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p2 values less than (to_date('01-Feb-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p3 values less than (to_date('01-Mar-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p4 values less than (to_date('01-Apr-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p5 values less than (to_date('01-May-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p6 values less than (to_date('01-Jun-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p7 values less than (to_date('01-Jul-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p8 values less than (to_date('01-Aug-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')),
                partition start_p9 values less than (to_date('01-Sep-2020','dd-mon-yyyy'))
        )
;

insert into t_range select
        to_date('01-Jan-2020','dd-mon-yyyy') + rownum,
        rownum,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0'),
        lpad('x',100,'x')
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 240 -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue  
;

insert into t_interval select
        to_date('01-Jan-2020','dd-mon-yyyy') + rownum,
        rownum,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0'),
        lpad('x',100,'x')
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 240 -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

commit;

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname     => null,
                tabname     => 'T_RANGE',
                method_opt  => 'for all columns size 1'
        );

        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname     => null,
                tabname     => 'T_INTERVAL',
                method_opt  => 'for all columns size 1'
        );
end;
/

I’ve used composite partitioned tables in this example but the same anomaly appears with simple partitioning – which you can test by commenting out the “subpartion by ..” lines. The two tables have partitions defined to hold a month’s data. I’ve inserted a few rows into most of the partitions, and ensured that I haven’t accidentally attempted to insert data that falls outside the legal range of the table with the predefined partitions .

To show that the tables are nominally identical here’s the list of partitions with their high values and number of rows:

column table_name       format a15
column partition_name   format a15
column high_value       format a80

break on table_name skip 1

select
        table_name, partition_name, num_rows, high_value
from
        user_tab_partitions
where
        table_name in ('T_INTERVAL','T_RANGE')
order by
        table_name, partition_name
;


ABLE_NAME      PARTITION_NAME    NUM_ROWS HIGH_VALUE
--------------- --------------- ---------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T_INTERVAL      START_P1                 0 TO_DATE(' 2020-01-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10722              30 TO_DATE(' 2020-02-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10723              29 TO_DATE(' 2020-03-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10724              31 TO_DATE(' 2020-04-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10725              30 TO_DATE(' 2020-05-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10726              31 TO_DATE(' 2020-06-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10727              30 TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10728              31 TO_DATE(' 2020-08-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                SYS_P10729              28 TO_DATE(' 2020-09-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA

T_RANGE         START_P1                 0 TO_DATE(' 2020-01-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P2                30 TO_DATE(' 2020-02-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P3                29 TO_DATE(' 2020-03-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P4                31 TO_DATE(' 2020-04-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P5                30 TO_DATE(' 2020-05-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P6                31 TO_DATE(' 2020-06-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P7                30 TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P8                31 TO_DATE(' 2020-08-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA
                START_P9                28 TO_DATE(' 2020-09-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIA


18 rows selected.

With this setup we can now run a simple query against the two tables using a where clause that is an exact match for the partition definition for the July data:

set serveroutput off

select 
        count(*) 
from 
        t_range 
where   order_date >= date '2020-07-01'  -- to_date('01-Jul-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')
and     order_date <  date '2020-08-01'  -- to_date('01-Aug-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

select 
        count(*) 
from 
        t_interval 
where   order_date >= date '2020-07-01'  -- to_date('01-Jul-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')
and     order_date <  date '2020-08-01'  -- to_date('01-Aug-2020','dd-mon-yyyy')
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

I’ve left in two versions of the date predicates – the “ANSI” style, and a strictly formatted “to_char()” style that is still the approached used most commonly in Oracle systems. The effect on the execution plans is the same for both variations of the date declaration, and here are the two execution plans – reported from an instance of 19.3.0.0:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name    | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |         |       |       |   130 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE         |         |     1 |     8 |            |          |       |       |
|   2 |   PARTITION RANGE SINGLE|         |    31 |   248 |   130   (3)| 00:00:01 |     8 |     8 |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL    | T_RANGE |    31 |   248 |   130   (3)| 00:00:01 |     8 |     8 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name       | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |            |       |       |   130 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE         |            |     1 |     8 |            |          |       |       |
|   2 |   PARTITION RANGE SINGLE|            |    31 |   248 |   130   (3)| 00:00:01 |     8 |     8 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL    | T_INTERVAL |    31 |   248 |   130   (3)| 00:00:01 |     8 |     8 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   3 - filter(("ORDER_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_DATE"<TO_DATE(' 2020-08-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss')))

It’s quite possible that you won’t notice the difference these plans, even though I’ve put them directly one below the other; and it’s very likely that most people wouldn’t think about the difference if they didn’t have the two plans available at the same time to compare.

If you can’t spot the difference it’s because I’ve deliberately arranged them in a way that might fool you into not looking carefully enough.

If you’ve spotted the difference it’s probably because you’ve examined the Predicate Information section. There isn’t one for the the t_range example but there is one for the t_interval example – and it was a little sneaky of me to make it easy for you to assume that the one set of predicates I showed was common to the two plans.

Since the plans have been pulled from memory (v$sql_plan) it seems likely that they are truthful and the query based on the interval partitioning is actually checking every row in the partition against two date values. In my example that’s not going to make much difference to performance, but in a datawarehouse with millions of rows per partition there’s scope for a noticeable increase in CPU between the two queries – especially since the block reads are likely to be direct path, bypassing much of the usual (CPU -intensive) buffer cache activity.

Interestingly when I checked the 10053 trace files for the two queries the CPU cost for the pair was identical. Normally you expect to see at least a little CPU cost (even if it’s only tens of units out of millions) for checking a predicate. This raises the question – does the optimizer allow a cost for the t_range table for an event that isn’t going to happen, or is it reporting an event that isn’t going to happen for the t_interval table. [Edit: easy enough to check by doing the test on a simple heap table that clones the data from that one partition, and checking the calculated cost with and without the predicate]

There’s a further ramification to this anomaly, relating to the question on the Oracle-L list server that prompted the investigation. What happens on Exadata where the predicates can be offloaded to storage?

The original question wasn’t actually about the appearance (or not) of the predicates, it was about an unexpected cardinality estimate for a query involving two equi-partitioned tables, so this note has gone completely off-topic from the question; but another strange detail about the predicates showed up when I suggested the creation of a column group on the join columns. A (redundant) predicate that had been offloaded to storage stopped being offloaded; here, from the original posting with the original tables, are the two different Predicate Information sections that appeared – the first without the column group, the second after the column group had been created and its stats collected:

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - access("ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_NUMBER"="ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_NUMBER" AND
              "ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"="ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE")
   6 - storage("ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-31
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))
       filter("ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-31
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))
   8 - storage("ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-31
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))
       filter("ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-31
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 -
access("ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_NUMBER"="ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_NUMBER" AND
              "ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"="ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE")
   6 - storage("ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<TO_DATE(' 2020-08-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))
       filter("ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_REQST"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<TO_DATE(' 2020-08-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))
   8 - filter("ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE">=TO_DATE(' 2020-07-01
00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "ORDER_DETL"."ORDR_RQST_DATE"<TO_DATE(' 2020-08-01 00:00:00',
'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))

Notice how the storage() predicate that appears at operation 8 in the first set has disappeared from the second even though operation 6 manages to retain its storage() predicate throughout.

I’ve modelled a further example of odd behaviour using two pairs of tables – one pair using range/hash partitioning the other interval/hash partitioning. I won’t reproduce it here but the problem of redundant predicates appearing and then disappearing gets even stranger.

I haven’t yet produced an example where the unexpected predicate behaviour has affected the costs or cardinalities – but I’ve only spent a couple of hours playing around with well-formed examples: it’s possible that in badly formed examples (e.g. with statistical inconsistencies) the side effect could mean that two notionally identical queries produce different numbers and different plans because they end up with different predicates in the final transformed query.

Footnote

Following an email from David Kurtz, it occurred to me that I should have made it clear that the disappearance of predicates on the partition key is expected behaviour when the predicates are clearly synchronised with the partition boundaries. The behaviour for the interval partitioning is the oddity, the behaviour for the “normal” range partitioning is the standard.

Inline Hint

If you’ve ever used subquery factoring (“with” subqueries or common table expressions (CTEs) as they are often called) then you’re probably aware of the (undocumented) hints /*+ materialize */ , which forces Oracle to create a local temporary table to hold the result of the subquery for subsequent use, and /*+ inline */, which forces the optimizer to copy the text of the subquery into the body of the query before starting the optimisation phase.

There’s a small, but important, enhancement to these hints that appeared in Oracle 18. Like so many other hints in Oracle they can now have a query block name as a “parameter”, so you can use them at the top level of your query. Here’s some code to demonstrate:

rem
rem     Script:         inline_hint.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Oct 2020
rem     Purpose:        
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem             18.3.0.0
rem             12.2.0.1  -- hints don't have any effect
rem

create table t1
as
select  *
from    all_objects
where   rownum <= 10000  -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue
/

create index t1_i1 on t1(object_id);

create table t2
as
select  *
from    t1
/

create index t2_i1 on t2(object_id);

spool inline_hint.lst


explain plan for
with v1 as (
        select 
                /*+ 
                        qb_name(cte) 
                */ 
                object_id, object_type, object_name 
                from t2 gtt1
                where object_id is not null
)
select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                inline(@cte)
        */
        t1.object_id,
        t1.object_name
from
        t1
where
        exists (
                select
                        null
                from
                        v1      v1a
                where
                        v1a.object_id = t1.object_id
                and     v1a.object_type = 'TABLE'
        )
and     exists (
                select
                        null
                from
                        v1      v1b
                where
                        v1b.object_id = t1.object_id
                and     v1b.object_name like 'WRI%'
        )
and
        t1.object_id between 100 and 200
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(format=>'alias'));

explain plan for
with v1 as (
        select 
                /*+ 
                        qb_name(cte) 
                */ 
                object_id, object_type, object_name 
                from t2 gtt1
                where object_id is not null
)
select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                materialize(@cte)
        */
        t1.object_id,
        t1.object_name
from
        t1
where
        exists (
                select
                        null
                from
                        v1      v1a
                where
                        v1a.object_id = t1.object_id
                and     v1a.object_type = 'TABLE'
        )
and
        t1.object_id between 100 and 200
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(format=>'alias'));

The first of these two queries uses the factored subquery twice so, by default, it will create a “cursor duration memory” temporary table to hold the results of the subquery and then use that temporary table twice in the execution plan.

Conversely the second query uses the factored subquery just once, so the optimizer’s default action will be to copy the text into the body of the main query and optimize the whole thing as a single query block.

To reverse the default behaviour in versions of Oracle up to 12.2.0.1 (though later patch sets may include the 18c enhancements) you could add the /*+ inline */ or /*+ materialize */ hints respectively to the factored subqueries; but my demonstration you can see that I’ve given the factored subquery a query block name and added the relevant hint to the main query block passing in the query block name of the factored subquery – hence /*+ inline(@cte) */ and /*+ materialize(@cte) */.

Here – from 19.3 – are the resulting execution plans (with some cosmetic editing) – first the plan with the inline() hint.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                              | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                       |       |     1 |    63 |     9  (12)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS SEMI                     |       |     1 |    63 |     9  (12)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS                         |       |     1 |    50 |     7  (15)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    SORT UNIQUE                         |       |     1 |    25 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |     1 |    25 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2_I1 |    48 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED | T1    |     1 |    25 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  7 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN                   | T1_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED  | T2    |     1 |    13 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  9 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                    | T2_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$06B48120
   4 - SEL$06B48120 / GTT1@CTE
   5 - SEL$06B48120 / GTT1@CTE
   6 - SEL$06B48120 / T1@MAIN
   7 - SEL$06B48120 / T1@MAIN
   8 - SEL$06B48120 / GTT1@CTE
   9 - SEL$06B48120 / GTT1@CTE

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter("OBJECT_NAME" LIKE 'WRI%')
   5 - access("OBJECT_ID">=100 AND "OBJECT_ID"<=200)
   7 - access("OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
       filter("T1"."OBJECT_ID"<=200 AND "T1"."OBJECT_ID">=100)
   8 - filter("OBJECT_TYPE"='TABLE')
   9 - access("OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
       filter("OBJECT_ID"<=200 AND "OBJECT_ID">=100)

As you can see Oracle has copied the subquery text into the main body of the text and then optimized to produce a three-table join. One of the subqueries has been unnested into an aggregate view (operations 3,4,5), the other has been transformed into a semi-join.

In passing you’ll also notice that the optimizer has used transitive closure to add the range predicate on t1 to both occurrences of the t2 table.

And here’s the plan for the query with the single use of the subquery and materialize() hint:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                | Name                       | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                         |                            |    48 |  2448 |    39   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  TEMP TABLE TRANSFORMATION               |                            |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   LOAD AS SELECT (CURSOR DURATION MEMORY)| SYS_TEMP_0FD9D6611_F53A566 |       |       |            |          |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL                     | T2                         | 10000 |   322K|    27   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |   HASH JOIN SEMI                         |                            |    48 |  2448 |    13  (16)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED   | T1                         |    48 |  1200 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  6 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN                     | T1_I1                      |    48 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  7 |    VIEW                                  |                            | 10000 |   253K|     8  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|   8 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL                    | SYS_TEMP_0FD9D6611_F53A566 | 10000 |   322K|     8  (13)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$A3F38ADC
   2 - CTE
   3 - CTE          / GTT1@CTE
   5 - SEL$A3F38ADC / T1@MAIN
   6 - SEL$A3F38ADC / T1@MAIN
   7 - SEL$AA28F105 / V1A@SEL$1
   8 - SEL$AA28F105 / T1@SEL$AA28F105

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - access("V1A"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   6 - access("T1"."OBJECT_ID">=100 AND "T1"."OBJECT_ID"<=200)
   7 - filter("V1A"."OBJECT_TYPE"='TABLE' AND "V1A"."OBJECT_ID">=100 AND "V1A"."OBJECT_ID"<=200)

In this plan the optimizer has created an in-memory temporary table and then used it in the existence subquery – which it has then transformed into a semi-join, so we have a query block with the name SEL$A3F38ADC; but we also see that the query block CTE still exists, labelling the operations that Oracle used to populate the temporary table.

It is an interesting (and irritating) detail that when we look at object aliases we see (operation 8) that Oracle has given the temporary table the alias of t1 – which is just a little confusing since I actually have a table called t1!

Next Steps

Being able to nominate a query block for the inline() and materialize() hints may be of great help in some cases (there’s a recent example on the Oracle Developer Forum (may need a MOS login) where it might make a huge difference to the performance of a particular query without requiring a rewrite of the SQL).

But there are a couple of details to investigate. First, I had a query block name built into my factored subquery – what happens if the author of the SQL didn’t include a query block name?

Before I’d added the inline() hint and query block names in the first example above this is what the plan looked like:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                | Name                       | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                         |                            |    48 |  6240 |    48  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  TEMP TABLE TRANSFORMATION               |                            |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   LOAD AS SELECT (CURSOR DURATION MEMORY)| SYS_TEMP_0FD9D6612_F53A566 |       |       |            |          |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL                     | T2                         | 10000 |   322K|    27   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |   HASH JOIN SEMI                         |                            |    48 |  6240 |    21  (15)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    HASH JOIN SEMI                        |                            |    48 |  4992 |    13  (16)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED  | T1                         |    48 |  1200 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  7 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                    | T1_I1                      |    48 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |     VIEW                                 |                            | 10000 |   771K|     8  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|   9 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                   | SYS_TEMP_0FD9D6612_F53A566 | 10000 |   322K|     8  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|* 10 |    VIEW                                  |                            | 10000 |   253K|     8  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|  11 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL                    | SYS_TEMP_0FD9D6612_F53A566 | 10000 |   322K|     8  (13)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$A317D234
   2 - SEL$1
   3 - SEL$1        / GTT1@SEL$1
   6 - SEL$A317D234 / T1@SEL$2
   7 - SEL$A317D234 / T1@SEL$2
   8 - SEL$D67CB2D2 / V1B@SEL$4
   9 - SEL$D67CB2D2 / T1@SEL$D67CB2D2
  10 - SEL$D67CB2D3 / V1A@SEL$3
  11 - SEL$D67CB2D3 / T1@SEL$D67CB2D3

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - access("V1A"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   5 - access("V1B"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   7 - access("T1"."OBJECT_ID">=100 AND "T1"."OBJECT_ID"<=200)
   8 - filter("V1B"."OBJECT_NAME" LIKE 'WRI%' AND "V1B"."OBJECT_ID">=100 AND "V1B"."OBJECT_ID"<=200)
  10 - filter("V1A"."OBJECT_TYPE"='TABLE' AND "V1A"."OBJECT_ID">=100 AND "V1A"."OBJECT_ID"<=200)

As you can see, the factored subquery (operations 2 and 3) has the query block name of sel$1 and the main query (operations 6 an 7 where the real t1 is used) has the query block name sel$2. So without giving the subquery a name I could have used the hint /*+ inline(@sel$1) */ in the main query block.

This takes us on to the second point that needs investigation. If you’ve looked at the example on the Oracle Developer Forum you will have seen that there’s an SQL statement that references a stored view and the factored subquery of interest is defined in the view. This means we might be able to edit the query that calls the view to include a hint referencing the query block inside the view – but then what do we do if we can’t edit the main query itself?

To be investigated (1) – would the inline() hint with nominated query block work if the factored subquery was inside a stored view that we were using in our query?

To be investigated(2) – if (1) works, could we achieve the same result by using an SQL Patch to attach the hint to the main query text without editing the main query?

Update (Oct 2020)

It turns out that I discovered this enhancement a few months ago while doing some experimentation with recursive subquery factoring.

Update Nov 2020

A blog note from Nenad Noveljic warns of a surprising ORA-07445 if you get too trigger-happy with the inline() and materialize() hints.

Index FFS Cost

There are a number of unexpected issues with the optimizer’s treatment of the index fast full scan, the access path where Oracle ignores the structure of the B-tree and uses multiblock reads to do a brute-force segment scan as if the index were a “skinny table” with a few blocks of irrelevant garbage (i.e. the branch blocks) that could be ignored.

A recent comment made a few days on a blog about the optimizer’s “index-join” access path reminded me that I had a few notes to finish and publish that might help some people address performance issues relating to a couple of little-known fixes for optimizer oddities in this area. Today’s “fix” is one that appeared in 10g (or maybe very late in 9i) but never became the default optimizer behaviour (possibly because it’s one of those “not a bug” types of bug with no “always correct” strategy).

The problem revolves around the optimizer_index_cost_adj parameter (which is another reason why the fix might have been kept out of the standard code base). For index-only execution plans the parameter will apply to the index range scan, full scan, or skip scan, but not to the index fast full scan. Here’s a model to demonstrate this:

rem
rem     Script:         oica_iffs.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Nov 2012
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

create table t1
as
with generator as (
        select  --+ materialize
                rownum id 
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue
)
select
        lpad(trunc(dbms_random.value(0,10000)),10)      v1,
        rpad('x',20)                                    padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e6 -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

create index t1_i1 on t1(v1);

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname          => user,
                tabname          =>'T1',
                cascade          => true,
                method_opt       => 'for all columns size 1'
        );
end;
.

select blocks from user_tables where table_name = 'T1';
select leaf_blocks from user_indexes where index_name = 'T1_I1';

I’ve created a fairly narrow table with 1M rows, and created an index on that table on the v1 column. In my test there were 5,219 blocks in the table and 3,068 blocks in the index.

I’m now going to run a query to count the rows in the table where v1 is not null and report its execution plan. The first run will be unhinted, the second run will include a hint that forces an index full scan, and the third run will include a hint to force an index fast full scan.

prompt  ==============
prompt  Unhinted query
prompt  ==============

select 
        count(*) 
from
        t1
where
        v1 is not null
;

prompt  ==========
prompt  Index hint
prompt  ==========

select 
        /*+ index(t1) */
        count(*) 
from
        t1
where
        v1 is not null
;

prompt  ==============
prompt  index_ffs hint
prompt  ==============

select 
        /*+ index_ffs(t1) */
        count(*) 
from
        t1
where
        v1 is not null
;

Here are the three execution plans. As you might have predicted the default plan (for my Oracle 19.3) is the index fast full scan:

==============
Unhinted query
==============
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |       |     1 |    11 |   450  (15)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|   450  (15)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("V1" IS NOT NULL)

==========
Index hint
==========
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation        | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |       |     1 |    11 |  3159   (3)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE  |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|  3159   (3)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("V1" IS NOT NULL)

==============
index_ffs hint
==============
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |       |     1 |    11 |   450  (15)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|   450  (15)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("V1" IS NOT NULL)

Since the size of the index is less than the size of the table the cost of the index fast full scan will be lower than the cost of a tablescan; and since an index fast full scan does multiblock reads while the index full scan is assumed to use single block reads the cost of the index fast full scan will be lower than the cost of the index full scan.

Now we set the optimizer_index_cost_adj to 1 (as happens in a number of “legacy” commercial products) and repeat the experiment. Here are the three plans (reduced to just the body of the plan):

==================
OICA = 1, Unhinted
==================
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation        | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |       |     1 |    11 |    32   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE  |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|    32   (4)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

====================
OICA = 1, index hint
====================
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation        | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |       |     1 |    11 |    32   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE  |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|    32   (4)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

========================
OICA = 1, index_ffs hint
========================
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |       |     1 |    11 |   450  (15)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|   450  (15)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The default plan is now the index full scan, not the index fast full scan; and when we look at the two hinted plans we can see why. The full scan cost has been reduced to 1% of the original cost (as dictated by the setting for optimizer_index_cost_adj); the fast full scan cost has not been adjusted.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Different people may answer that question differently. There are clearly likely to be cases where changing the setting for the optimizer_index_cost_adj (which you shouldn’t have been doing anyway for the last 20 years or so) will result in some plans switching from fast full scans to full scans with unfortunate consequences;

On the other hand when you do a fast full scan it may do direct path reads, while the full scan will do cached reads, and the cache may be holding a lot of the index leaf blocks already, so some people might prefer the current behaviour;

On the other, other hand an Exadata system can use storage indexes when doing direct path segment scans (even when the segment is an index) so an Exadata fast full scan might be far more desirable than a partially cached full scan.

So no generic right answer, only specific answers for particular sets of circumstances.

Solutions

This issue was addressed some time in the 10g timeline- my notes say the earliest successful tests I did of the fix were on 10.2.0.4, and that it wasn’t available in 9.2.0.8. There are two possibilities – a fix control, and an event.

• Fix control: 4483286 – descibed as “Discount FFS cost using optimizer_index_cost_adj”
• Event: 38085 at level one. I don’t think this event has ever appeared in the oraus.msg file, but it is referenced by bug 4483286

Of the two, setting the fix control is probably the safer option since the event is (apparently) non-existent and there’s always the possibility that the number will be hi-jacked in a future release to do something completely different. It’s also worth noting that the fix control can be applied to an individual statement through the /*+ opt_param() */ hint (there’s an example of the syntax towards the end of another article of mine).

A little demonstration:

-- alter session set events '38085 trace name context forever, level 1';
alter session set "_fix_control"='4483286:1';
alter session set optimizer_index_cost_adj = 1;

set autotrace traceonly explain

prompt  ==============
prompt  Unhinted query
prompt  ==============

select 
        count(*) 
from
        t1
where
        v1 is not null
;

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |       |     1 |    11 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE       |       |     1 |    11 |            |          |
|*  2 |   INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| T1_I1 |  1000K|    10M|     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With the event or _fix_control set the cost of the index fast full scan drops to 1%, and the path reappears without being hinted.

 

Serial Bloom

Following the recent note I wrote about an enhancement to the optimizer’s use of Bloom filters, I received a question by email asking about the use of Bloom filters in serial execution plans:

I’m having difficulty understanding the point of a Bloom filter when used in conjunction with a hash join where everything happens within the same process.

I believe you mentioned in your book (Cost Based Oracle) that hash joins have a mechanism similar to a Bloom filter where a row from the probe table is checked against a bitmap, where each hash table bucket is indicated by a single bit. (You have a picture on page 327 of the hash join and bitmap, etc).

The way that bitmap looks and operates appears to be similar to a Bloom filter to me…. So it looks (to me) like hash joins have a sort of “Bloom filter” already built into them.

My question is… What is the advantage of adding a Bloom filter to a hash join if you already have a type of Bloom filter mechanism thingy built in to hash joins?

I can understand where it would make sense with parallel queries having to pass data from one process to another, but if everything happens within the same process I’m just curious where the benefit is.

 

The picture on page 327 of CBO-F is a variation on the following, which is the penultimate snapshot of the sequence of events in a multi-pass hash join. The key feature is the in-memory bitmap at the top of the image describing which buckets in the (partitioned and spilled) hash table hold rows from the build table. I believe that it is exactly this bitmap that is used as the Bloom filter.

The question of why it might be worth creating and using a Bloom filter in a simple serial hash join is really a question of scale. What is the marginal benefit of the Bloom filter when the basic hash join mechanism is doing all the hash arithmetic and comparing with a bitmap anyway?

If the hash join is running on an Exadata machine then the bitmap can be passed as a predicate to the cell servers and the hash function can be used at the cell server to minimise the volume of data that has to be passed back to the database server – with various optimisations dependent on the version of the Exadata software. Clearly minimising traffic through the interconnect is going to have some benefit.

Similarly, as the email suggests, for a parallel query where (typically) one set of parallel processes will read the probe table and distribute the data to the second set of parallel processes which then do the hash join it’s clearly sensible to allow the first set of procsses to apply the hash function and discard as many rows as possible before distributing the survivors – minimising inter-process communication.

In both these cases, of course, there’s a break point to consider of how effective the Bloom filter needs to be before it’s worth taking advantage of the technology. If the Bloom filter allows 99 rows out of every hundred to be passed to the database server / second set of parallel processes then Oracle has executed the hash function and checked the bitmap 100 times to avoid sending one row (and it will (may) have to do the same hash function and bitmap check again to perform the hash join); on the other hand if the Bloom filter discards 99 rows and leaves only one row surviving then that’s a lot of traffic eliminated – and that’s likely to be a good thing. This is why there are a few hidden parameters defining the boundaries of when Bloom filters should be used – in particular there’s a parameter “_bloom_filter_ratio” which defaults to 35 and is, I suspect, a figure which says something like “use Bloom filtering only if it’s expected to reduce the probe data to 35% of the unfiltered size”.

So the question then becomes: “how could you benefit from a serial Bloom filter when it’s the same process doing everything and there’s no “long distance” traffic going on between processes?” The answer is simply that we’re operating at a much smaller scale. I’ve written blog notes in the past where the performance of a query depends largely on the number of rows that are passed up a query plan before being eliminated (for example here, where the volume of data moving results in a significant fraction of the total time).

If you consider a very simple hash join its plan is going to be shaped something like this:

-----------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |
-----------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |    45 |   720 |    31 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN         |      |    45 |   720 |    31 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |    15 |   120 |    15 |
|   3 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 24000 |    15 |
-----------------------------------------------------------

If you read Tanel Poder’s article on execution plans as a tree of Oracle function calls you’ll appreciate that you could translate this into informal English along the lines of:

• Operation 1 calls a function (at operation 2) to do a tablescan of t1 and return all the relevant rows, building an in-memory hash table by applying a hashing function to the join column(s) of each row returned by the call to the tablescan. As the hash table is populated the operation also constructs a bitmap to flag buckets in the hash table that have been populated.
• Operation 1 then calls a function (at operation 3) to start a tablescan and then makes repeated calls for it to return one row (or, in newer versions, a small rowset) at a time from table t2. For each row returned operation 1 applies the same hash function to the join column(s) and checks the bitmap to see if there’s a potential matching row in the relevant bucket of the hash table, and if there’s a potential match Oracle examines the actual contents of the bucket (which will be stored as a linked list) to see if there’s an actual match.

Taking the figures above, let’s imagine that Oracle is using a rowset size of 30 rows. Operation 1 will have to make 100 calls to Operation 3 to get all the data, and call the hashing function 3,000 times.  A key CPU component of the work done is that the function represented by operation 3 is called 100 times and (somehow) allocates and fills an array of 30 entries each time it is called.

Now assume operation 1 passes the bitmap to operation 3 as an input and it happens to be a perfect bitmap. Operation 3 starts its tablescan and will call the hash function 3,000 times, but at most 45 rows will get past the bitmap. So operation 1 will only have to call operation 3 twice.  Admittedly operation 1 will (possibly) call the hash function again for each row – but maybe operation 3 will supply the hash value in the return array. Clearly there’s scope here for a trade-off between the reduction in work due to the smaller number of calls and the extra work needed to take advantage of the bitmap technology.

Here’s an example that shows the potential for savings – if you want to recreate this test you’ll need about 800MB of free space in the database, the first table takes about 300MB and the second about 450MB.

rem
rem     Script:         bloom_filter_serial_02.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Sep 2020
rem     Purpose:        
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

create table t1
as
with generator as (
        select 
                rownum id
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        rownum                          id,
        lpad(rownum,30,'0')             v1
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e7 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

create table t2
as
with generator as (
        select 
                rownum id
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        round(rownum + 0.5,2)           id,
        mod(rownum,1e5)                 n1,
        lpad(rownum,10)                 v1
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e7 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;


prompt  =================
prompt  With Bloom filter
prompt  =================

select 
        /*+ 
                px_join_filter(t1) 
                monitor
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from 
        t2, t1
where 
        t2.n1 = 0
and 
        t1.id = t2.id
/

prompt  ===============
prompt  No Bloom filter
prompt  ===============

select 
        /*+
                monitor
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from 
        t2, t1
where 
        t2.n1 = 0
and 
        t1.id = t2.id
/

I’ve created tables t1 and t2 with an id column that never quite matches, but the range of values is set so that the optimizer thinks the two tables might have a near-perfect 1 to 1 match. I’ve given t2 an extra column with 10⁵ distinct values in its 10⁷ rows, so it’s going to have 100 rows per distinct value. Then I’ve presented the optimizer with a query that looks as if it’s going to find 100 rows in t2 and needs to find a probable 100 rows of matches in t1. For my convenience, and to highlight a couple of details of Bloom filters, it’s not going to find any matches.

In both runs I’ve enabled the SQL Monitor feature with the /*+ monitor */ hint, and in the first run I’ve also hinted the use of a Bloom filter. Here are the resulting SQL Monitor outputs. Bear in mind we’re looking at a reasonably large scale query – volume of input data – with a small result set.

First without the Bloom filter:

Global Stats
================================================================
| Elapsed |   Cpu   |    IO    | Fetch | Buffer | Read | Read  |
| Time(s) | Time(s) | Waits(s) | Calls |  Gets  | Reqs | Bytes |
================================================================
|    3.00 |    2.24 |     0.77 |     1 |  96484 |  773 | 754MB |
================================================================

SQL Plan Monitoring Details (Plan Hash Value=2959412835)
==================================================================================================================================================
| Id |      Operation       | Name |  Rows   | Cost  |   Time    | Start  | Execs |   Rows   | Read | Read  |  Mem  | Activity | Activity Detail |
|    |                      |      | (Estim) |       | Active(s) | Active |       | (Actual) | Reqs | Bytes | (Max) |   (%)    |   (# samples)   |
==================================================================================================================================================
|  0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |         |       |         2 |     +2 |     1 |        0 |      |       |     . |          |                 |
|  1 |   HASH JOIN          |      |     100 | 14373 |         2 |     +2 |     1 |        0 |      |       |   2MB |          |                 |
|  2 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | T2   |      99 |  5832 |         2 |     +1 |     1 |      100 |  310 | 301MB |     . |          |                 |
|  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | T1   |     10M |  8140 |         2 |     +2 |     1 |      10M |  463 | 453MB |     . |          |                 |
==================================================================================================================================================

According to the Global Stats the query has taken 3 seconds to complete, of which 2.24 seconds is CPU. (The 750MB read in 0.77 second would be due to the fact that I’m running off SSD, and I’ve got a 1MB read size that helps). A very large fraction of the CPU appears because of the number of calls from operation 1 to operation 3 (the projection information pulled from memory reports a rowset size of 256 rows, so that’s roughly 40,000 calls to the function.

When we force the use of a Bloom filter the plan doesn’t change much (though the creation and use of the Bloom filter has to be reported) – but the numbers do change quite significantly.

Global Stats
================================================================
| Elapsed |   Cpu   |    IO    | Fetch | Buffer | Read | Read  |
| Time(s) | Time(s) | Waits(s) | Calls |  Gets  | Reqs | Bytes |
================================================================
|    1.97 |    0.99 |     0.98 |     1 |  96484 |  773 | 754MB |
================================================================

SQL Plan Monitoring Details (Plan Hash Value=4148581417)
======================================================================================================================================================
| Id |       Operation       |  Name   |  Rows   | Cost  |   Time    | Start  | Execs |   Rows   | Read | Read  |  Mem  | Activity | Activity Detail |
|    |                       |         | (Estim) |       | Active(s) | Active |       | (Actual) | Reqs | Bytes | (Max) |   (%)    |   (# samples)   |
======================================================================================================================================================
|  0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |         |         |       |         1 |     +1 |     1 |        0 |      |       |     . |          |                 |
|  1 |   HASH JOIN           |         |     100 | 14373 |         1 |     +1 |     1 |        0 |      |       |   1MB |          |                 |
|  2 |    JOIN FILTER CREATE | :BF0000 |      99 |  5832 |         1 |     +1 |     1 |      100 |      |       |     . |          |                 |
|  3 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T2      |      99 |  5832 |         1 |     +1 |     1 |      100 |  310 | 301MB |     . |          |                 |
|  4 |    JOIN FILTER USE    | :BF0000 |     10M |  8140 |         1 |     +1 |     1 |    15102 |      |       |     . |          |                 |
|  5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T1      |     10M |  8140 |         1 |     +1 |     1 |    15102 |  463 | 453MB |     . |          |                 |
======================================================================================================================================================

In this case, the elapsed time dropped to 1.97 seconds (depending on your viewpoint that’s either a drop of “only 1.03 seconds” or drop of “an amazing 34.3%”; with the CPU time dropping from 2.24 seconds to 0.99 seconds (55.8% drop!)

In this case you’ll notice that the tablescan of t1 produced only 15,102 rows to pass up to the hash join at operation 1 thanks to the application of the predicate (not reported here): filter(SYS_OP_BLOOM_FILTER(:BF0000,”T1″.”ID”)). Instead of 40,000 calls for the next rowset the hash function has been applied during the tablescan and operation 5 has exhausted the tablescan after only about 60 calls. This is what has given us the (relatively) significant saving in CPU.

This example of the use of a Bloom filter highlights up the two points I referred to earlier.

• First, although we see operations 4 and 5 as Join (Bloom) filter use and Table access full respectively I don’t think the data from the tablescan is being “passed up” from operation 5 to 4; I believe operation 4 can be views as a “placeholder” in the plan to allow us to see the Bloom filter in action, the hashing and filtering actually happening during the tablescan.
• Secondly, we know that there are ultimately no rows in the result set, yet the application of the Bloom filter has not eliminated all the data. Remember that the bitmap that Oracle constructs of the hash table identifies used buckets, not actual values. Those 15,102 rows are rows that “might” find a match in the hash table because they belong in buckets that are flagged. A Bloom filter won’t discard any data that is needed, but it might fail to eliminate data that subsequently turns out to be unwanted.

How parallel is parallel anyway?

I’ll leave you with one other thought. Here’s an execution plan from 12c (12.2.0.1) which joins three dimension tables to a fact table. There are 343,000 rows in the fact table and the three joins individually identify about 4 percent of the data in the table. In a proper data warehouse we might have been looking at a bitmap star transformation solution for this query, but in a mixed system we might want to run warehouse queries against normalised data – this plan shows what Bloom filters can do to minimise the workload. The plan was acquired from memory after enabling rowsource execution statistics:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                    | Name     | Starts | E-Rows |    TQ  |IN-OUT| PQ Distrib | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem |  O/1/M   |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |          |      1 |        |        |      |            |      1 |00:00:00.05 |      22 |      3 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE              |          |      1 |      1 |        |      |            |      1 |00:00:00.05 |      22 |      3 |       |       |          |
|   2 |   PX COORDINATOR             |          |      1 |        |        |      |            |      2 |00:00:00.05 |      22 |      3 | 73728 | 73728 |          |
|   3 |    PX SEND QC (RANDOM)       | :TQ10000 |      0 |      1 |  Q1,00 | P->S | QC (RAND)  |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   4 |     SORT AGGREGATE           |          |      2 |      1 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      2 |00:00:00.09 |    6681 |   6036 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |      HASH JOIN               |          |      2 |     26 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.09 |    6681 |   6036 |  2171K|  2171K|     2/0/0|
|   6 |       JOIN FILTER CREATE     | :BF0000  |      2 |      3 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      20 |      4 |       |       |          |
|*  7 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL     | T3       |      2 |      3 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      20 |      4 |       |       |          |
|*  8 |       HASH JOIN              |          |      2 |    612 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.08 |    6634 |   6026 |  2171K|  2171K|     2/0/0|
|   9 |        JOIN FILTER CREATE    | :BF0001  |      2 |      3 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      20 |      4 |       |       |          |
|* 10 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL    | T2       |      2 |      3 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      20 |      4 |       |       |          |
|* 11 |        HASH JOIN             |          |      2 |  14491 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.08 |    6614 |   6022 |  2171K|  2171K|     2/0/0|
|  12 |         JOIN FILTER CREATE   | :BF0002  |      2 |      3 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      20 |      4 |       |       |          |
|* 13 |          TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T1       |      2 |      3 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      20 |      4 |       |       |          |
|  14 |         JOIN FILTER USE      | :BF0000  |      2 |    343K|  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.08 |    6594 |   6018 |       |       |          |
|  15 |          JOIN FILTER USE     | :BF0001  |      2 |    343K|  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.08 |    6594 |   6018 |       |       |          |
|  16 |           JOIN FILTER USE    | :BF0002  |      2 |    343K|  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.08 |    6594 |   6018 |       |       |          |
|  17 |            PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |      2 |    343K|  Q1,00 | PCWC |            |     27 |00:00:00.08 |    6594 |   6018 |       |       |          |
|* 18 |             TABLE ACCESS FULL| T4       |     48 |    343K|  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |     27 |00:00:00.05 |    6594 |   6018 |       |       |          |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s a parallel plan, but it’s used the 12c “PQ_REPLICATE” strategy. The optimizer has decided that all the dimension tables are so small that it’s going to allow every PX process to read every (dimension) table through the buffer cache and build its own hash tables from them. (In earlier versions you might have seen the query coordinator scanning and broadcasting the three small tables, or one set of PX processes scanning and broadcasting to the other set).

So every PX process has an in-memory hash table of all three dimension tables and then (operation 17) they start a tablescan of the fact table, picking non-overlapping rowid ranges to scan. But since they’ve each created three in-memory hash tables they’ve also been able to create three Bloom filters each, which can all be applied simultaneously as the tablescan takes place; so instead of 343,000 rows being passed up the plan and through the first hash join (where we see from operation 11 that the number of surviving rows would have been about 14,500 ) we see all but 27 rows discarded very early on in the processing. Like bitmap indexes part of the power of Bloom filters lies in the fact that with the right plan the optimizer can combine them and identify a very small data set very precisely, very early.

The other thing I want you to realise about this plan, though, is that it’s not really an “extreme” parallel plan. It’s effectively running as a set of concurrent, non-interfering, serial plans. Since I was running (parallel 2) Oracle started just 2 PX processes: they both built three hash tables from the three dimension tables then split the fact table in half and took half each to do all the joins, and passed the nearly complete result to the query co-ordinator at the last moment. That’s as close as you can get to two serial, non-interfering, queries and still call it a parallel query. So, if you wonder why there might be any benefit in serial Bloom filters – Oracle’s actually being benefiting from it under the covers for several years.

Summary

Bloom filters trade a decrease in messaging against an increase in preparation and hashing operations. For Exadata systems with predicate offloading it’s very easy to see the potential benefit; for general parallel execution; it’s also fairly easy to see the potential benefit for parallel query execution what inter-process message between two sets of PX processes can be resource intensive; but even for serial queries there can be some benefit though, in absolute terms, they are likely to be only a small saving in CPU.

 

Bloom Upgrade

It’s a common pattern of Oracle features that they start with various restrictions or limitations that disappear over time. This note is about an enhancement to Bloom filter processing that appeared in the 18.1 optimizer and, for some people, may be a good enough reason for upgrading to a newer version of Oracle. This enhancement came to my attention by way of the Oracle Developer forum in a thread with the title Bloom filters and view using UNION ALL asking how to get a Bloom filter pushed inside a UNION ALL view. The original requirement wasn’t a trivial one so I’ll demonstrate the problem with a very simple example – first the data set:

rem
rem     Script:         bloom_pushdown.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Sep 2020
rem
rem     Last tested:
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

create table t1 as select * from all_objects where rownum <= 50000;
create table t2 as select t1.* from t1, (select rownum n1 from dual connect by level <= 4);
create table t3 as select t1.* from t1, (select rownum n1 from dual connect by level <= 4); -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname     => null,
                tabname     => 'T1',
                method_opt  => 'for all columns size 1 for columns object_type size 254'
        );
end;
/

I’ve been a bit lazy here, copying data from view all_objects. I’ve gathered stats on t1 so that I can generate a histogram on the object_type column because I’m going to query for a rare object_type and I want the optimizer to get a reasonable estimate of rows. I’m going to hint a parallel query to join t1 to t2 (aliased, trivially, as v1 for reasons that will become apparent soon):

select
        /*+ 
                parallel(2) 
        */
        t1.object_name, v1.object_name
from
        t1,
        t2 v1
where
        t1.object_type = 'SCHEDULE'
and     v1.object_id = t1.object_id
/

In my case the optimizer chooses to do a hash join between these two table, and creates a Bloom filter to try and minimise the data passing through the data flow operation. The result set in my 12.2.0.1 database is only 16 rows, so it would be nice if the parallel scan could eliminate most of the 200,000 rows in t2 early – here’s the execution plan pulled from memory after running the query with rowsource execution stats enabled:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation              | Name     | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem |  O/1/M   |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT       |          |      1 |        |   371 (100)|     16 |00:00:00.06 |      20 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR        |          |      1 |        |            |     16 |00:00:00.06 |      20 |      0 | 73728 | 73728 |          |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM)  | :TQ10000 |      0 |     16 |   371   (5)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN           |          |      2 |     16 |   371   (5)|     16 |00:00:00.05 |    6278 |   3988 |  1250K|  1250K|     2/0/0|
|   4 |     JOIN FILTER CREATE | :BF0000  |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |    2034 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL | T1       |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |    2034 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   6 |     JOIN FILTER USE    | :BF0000  |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.04 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|   7 |      PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.04 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|*  8 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.03 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("V1"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   5 - filter("T1"."OBJECT_TYPE"='SCHEDULE')
   8 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)
       filter(SYS_OP_BLOOM_FILTER(:BF0000,"V1"."OBJECT_ID"))

We see that Oracle has generated a Bloom filter at operation 4 from the data returned from t1 at operation 5, and then used that Bloom filter at operation 6 to eliminate most of the data from t2 before passing the remaining few rows up to the hash join.

Let’s make the query more interesting – what if you want to use a UNION ALL of t2 and t3 in the query (for example one might be “current data” while the other is “historic data”. Here’s the query and plan from 12.2.0.1:

select
        /*+ 
                parallel(2) 
        */
        t1.object_name, v1.object_name
from
        t1,
        (select * from t2 union all select * from t3) v1
where
        t1.object_type = 'SCHEDULE'
and     v1.object_id = t1.object_id
/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name     | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem |  O/1/M   |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |          |      1 |        |   667 (100)|     32 |00:00:00.37 |      40 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR         |          |      1 |        |            |     32 |00:00:00.37 |      40 |      0 | 73728 | 73728 |          |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM)   | :TQ10000 |      0 |     32 |   667   (5)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN            |          |      1 |     32 |   667   (5)|     32 |00:00:00.34 |    5125 |   3860 |  1250K|  1250K|     2/0/0|
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T1       |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |    2034 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   5 |     VIEW                |          |      2 |    400K|   584   (4)|    400K|00:00:00.52 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|   6 |      UNION-ALL          |          |      2 |        |            |    400K|00:00:00.24 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|   7 |       PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.11 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|*  8 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.07 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|   9 |       PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.11 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|* 10 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T3       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.03 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("V1"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   4 - filter("T1"."OBJECT_TYPE"='SCHEDULE')
   8 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)      -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue
  10 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)      -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue

No Bloom filter – so all 400,000 rows feed up the plan and through the hash join. This won’t matter too much for my sub-second tiny data set but on a pair of 50GB tables, with the potential to offload the Bloom filter to storage in Exadata and, perhaps, eliminate 99% of the data at the cell servers, this could make a huge difference to performance.

Since Bloom filters are all about hashing data (in Oracle the standard Bloom filter is the bitmap summarising the build table in a hash join) let’s trying pushing the optimizer into a hash distribution for the parallel join to see if that had any effect:

select
        /*+ 
                parallel(2) 
                gather_plan_statistics
                leading(@sel$1 t1@sel$1 v1@sel$1)
                use_hash(@sel$1 v1@sel$1)
                pq_distribute(@sel$1 v1@sel$1 hash hash)
        */
        t1.object_name, v1.object_name
from
        t1,
        (select * from t2 union all select * from t3) v1
where
        t1.object_type = 'SCHEDULE'
and     v1.object_id = t1.object_id
/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name     | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem |  O/1/M   |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |          |      1 |        |   667 (100)|     32 |00:00:00.43 |      60 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR             |          |      1 |        |            |     32 |00:00:00.43 |      60 |      0 | 73728 | 73728 |          |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM)       | :TQ10002 |      0 |     32 |   667   (5)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN BUFFERED       |          |      1 |     32 |   667   (5)|     32 |00:00:00.38 |    4000 |   3752 |  2290K|  2082K|     2/0/0|
|   4 |     JOIN FILTER CREATE      | :BF0000  |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   5 |      PX RECEIVE             |          |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   6 |       PX SEND HYBRID HASH   | :TQ10000 |      0 |      4 |    75   (4)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   7 |        STATISTICS COLLECTOR |          |      2 |        |            |      4 |00:00:00.01 |    1517 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   8 |         PX BLOCK ITERATOR   |          |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      4 |00:00:00.01 |    1517 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  9 |          TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T1       |     26 |      4 |    75   (4)|      4 |00:00:00.01 |    1517 |      0 |       |       |          |
|  10 |     PX RECEIVE              |          |      2 |    400K|   584   (4)|     66 |00:00:00.77 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|  11 |      PX SEND HYBRID HASH    | :TQ10001 |      2 |    400K|   584   (4)|     66 |00:00:00.77 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|  12 |       JOIN FILTER USE       | :BF0000  |      2 |    400K|   584   (4)|     66 |00:00:00.77 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|  13 |        VIEW                 |          |      2 |    400K|   584   (4)|    400K|00:00:00.68 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|  14 |         UNION-ALL           |          |      2 |        |            |    400K|00:00:00.59 |    8488 |   7976 |       |       |          |
|  15 |          PX BLOCK ITERATOR  |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.18 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|* 16 |           TABLE ACCESS FULL | T2       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.06 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|  17 |          PX BLOCK ITERATOR  |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.12 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
|* 18 |           TABLE ACCESS FULL | T3       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|    200K|00:00:00.08 |    4244 |   3988 |       |       |          |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("V1"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   9 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)   -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue 
       filter("T1"."OBJECT_TYPE"='SCHEDULE') 
  16 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)   -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue
  18 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)   -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue

We’ve managed to introduce a Bloom filter (which is visible as :BF0000 in the plan, even through there’s no reference to sys_op_bloom_filter() in the predicate information) but there’s a problem, we’re still passing 400,000 rows up the plan and the Bloom filter is only being applied at (or just after) the VIEW operator, discarding all but 66 rows before doing the hash join. It’s an improvement but not ideal; we’d like to see the Bloom filter applied to each of the two tables separately to eliminate rows as early as possible.

This can’t be done in 12.2, and you’d have to rewrite the query, changing a “join with union” into a “union of joins”, and that’s not really a desirable strategy.

Next Steps

Searching MOS, though you will be able to find the following note:

Doc ID 18849313.8 – ENH : bloom filters/pruning are pushed through union-all view

There’s an enhancement request to do what we want in 18.1, and the enhancement has got into the software. Here’s the (unhinted) plan from 19.3 (the plan stays the same when optimizer_features_enable is set back to 18.1.0, but drops back to the 12.1. plan when OFE is set to 12.2.0.1):

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name     | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem |  O/1/M   |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT         |          |      1 |        |   666 (100)|     32 |00:00:00.11 |      10 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR          |          |      1 |        |            |     32 |00:00:00.11 |      10 |      0 | 73728 | 73728 |          |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM)    | :TQ10000 |      0 |     32 |   666   (5)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN             |          |      2 |     32 |   666   (5)|     32 |00:00:00.05 |   10020 |   7958 |  1250K|  1250K|     2/0/0|
|   4 |     JOIN FILTER CREATE   | :BF0000  |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |    1998 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T1       |      2 |      4 |    75   (4)|      8 |00:00:00.01 |    1998 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   6 |     VIEW                 |          |      2 |    400K|   583   (4)|     32 |00:00:00.04 |    8022 |   7958 |       |       |          |
|   7 |      UNION-ALL           |          |      1 |        |            |     12 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
|   8 |       JOIN FILTER USE    | :BF0000  |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
|   9 |        PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
|* 10 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
|  11 |       JOIN FILTER USE    | :BF0000  |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
|  12 |        PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |      2 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
|* 13 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL| T3       |     32 |    200K|   292   (4)|     16 |00:00:00.02 |    4011 |   3979 |       |       |          |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("V1"."OBJECT_ID"="T1"."OBJECT_ID")
   5 - filter("T1"."OBJECT_TYPE"='SCHEDULE')
  10 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)      -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue
       filter(SYS_OP_BLOOM_FILTER(:BF0000,"T2"."OBJECT_ID")) 
  13 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z)      -- > edit to avoid wordpress format issue
       filter(SYS_OP_BLOOM_FILTER(:BF0000,"T3"."OBJECT_ID"))

As you can see, we create a Bloom filter at operation 4, and use it twice at operations 8 and 11 – with the sys_op_bloom_filter() functions clearly visible in the predicate information showing us that the Bloom filter is applied to the object_id column in both cases.

If you want to disable this enhancement for some reasons there are two hidden parameters available (which you might set for a single query using the opt_param() hint):

• _bloom_filter_setops_enabled = true
• _bloom_pruning_setops_enabled = true

The first is for Bloom filters in the situation shown, I assume the second deals with Bloom filters for partition pruning.

Summary

In versions prior to 18.1 the optimizer is unable to push Bloom filters down to the individual tables in a UNION ALL view, but this limitation was removed in the 18.1 code set.

 

Subquery with OR

I’ve written a couple of notes in the past about the problems of optimising queries with predicates of the form “or exists {subquery}”. A recent question on the Oracle Developer Community forum brought to my attention an improvement in this area in (very precisely) 12.2, as well as giving me a cute example of how the first cut of a new feature doesn’t always cover every detail, and creating a nice example of how the new technology enhances the old technology.

We start with some data and a simple query running under 12.2.0.1:

rem
rem     Script:         exists_with_or_4.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Aug 2020
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem             12.2.0.1
rem             12.1.0.2  -- feature not implemented
rem

create table cat_contact(
        contact_method_id       varchar2(1) not null,
        contact_id              number(8,0) not null,
        small_vc                varchar2(10),
        padding                 varchar2(100)
);

alter table cat_contact add constraint cc_pk primary key(contact_id);
create index cc_i1 on cat_contact(contact_method_id);

insert into cat_contact
select
        chr(64 + case when rownum <= 10 then rownum else 26 end),
        rownum,
        lpad(rownum,10),
        rpad('x',100,'x')
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 10000
;

select count(*) from cat_contact where contact_method_id in ('A','B','C');

create table cat_item(
        contact_id      number(8,0) not null,
        item_category   varchar2(1) not null,
        small_vc        varchar2(10),
        padding         varchar2(100),
        constraint ci_ref_cc foreign key(contact_id) references cat_contact
)
;

alter table cat_item add constraint ci_pk primary key(contact_id, item_category);
create index ci_i1 on cat_item(item_category);

insert into cat_item 
select
        rownum,
        chr(88 + case when rownum <= 10 then mod(rownum,2) else 2 end),
        lpad(rownum,10),
        rpad('x',100,'x')
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 10000
;

select count(*) from cat_item where item_category in ('X','Y');

execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'cat_contact')
execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'cat_item')

I’ve created and populated two tables (the table and column names come from the ODC thread). There’s a foreign key relationship defined between cat_item and cat_contact, both tables have primary keys declared, with a couple of extra columns declared not null.

I’ve populated the two tables with a small amount of data and each table has one column rigged with very skewed data:

• cat_contact.contact_method_id is mostly ‘Z’ with one row each of ‘A’ to ‘J’ ,
• cat_item.item_category (the second column in the primary key) is mostly ‘Z’ with 5 rows each of ‘X’ and ‘Y’

After populating each table I’ve queried it in a way which means the subsequent stats gathering will create frequency histograms on these two columns and the optimizer will be able to take advantage of the skew in its arithmetic, which means it may choose to use the indexes I’ve created on those skewed columns if the right values appear in the queries.

So here’s the query we’re interested in:

SELECT  /*+ 
                qb_name(main) 
        */ 
        *  
FROM    cat_contact c  
WHERE   (
                exists  (  
                        SELECT  /*+ qb_name(subq) */
                                *  
                        FROM    cat_item i  
                        WHERE   i.contact_id = c.contact_id  
                        AND     i.item_category in ('X', 'Y')  
                )
        OR      c.contact_method_id IN ('A', 'B', 'C')  
        )
;  

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

Here’s the default execution plan (in 12.2.0.1 with my settings for system stats and various other optimizer-related figures that MIGHT make a difference) pulled from memory after executing the query to return 10 rows.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name        | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |             |       |       |    34 (100)|          |
|*  1 |  FILTER             |             |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL | CAT_CONTACT | 10000 |  1152K|    34   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |   INLIST ITERATOR   |             |       |       |            |          |
|*  4 |    INDEX UNIQUE SCAN| CI_PK       |     1 |     6 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   1 - filter((INTERNAL_FUNCTION("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID") OR  IS NOT NULL))
   4 - access("I"."CONTACT_ID"=:B1 AND (("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR
              "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y')))

For every row in the cat_contact table Oracle has checked whether or not the contact_method is an ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’ and passed any such rows up to its parent, for all other rows it’s then executed the subquery to see if the row with the matching contact_id in contact_item has an ‘X’ or ‘Y’ as the item_category. It’s had to run the subquery 9,997 times (there were only three rows matching ‘A’,’B’,’C’) and the INLIST ITERATOR at operation 3 means that it’s probed the index nearly 20,000 timtes. This does not look efficient.

I’ve said in previous articles that when you need to optimize queries of this shape you need to rewrite them as UNION ALL queries to separate the two parts of the complex OR predicate and then make sure that you don’t report any items twice – which you do by making use of the lnnvl() function. So let’s do this – but let’s do it the lazy “new technology” way by upgrading to 19c and executing the query there; here’s the plan I got in 19.3.0.0:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                 | Name            | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                          |                 |       |       |    14 (100)|          |
|   1 |  VIEW                                     | VW_ORE_231AD113 |    13 |   962 |    14   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL                               |                 |       |       |            |          |
|   3 |    INLIST ITERATOR                        |                 |       |       |            |          |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED   | CAT_CONTACT     |     3 |   354 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                     | CC_I1           |     3 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |    NESTED LOOPS                           |                 |    10 |  1240 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     NESTED LOOPS                          |                 |    10 |  1240 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   8 |      SORT UNIQUE                          |                 |    10 |    60 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   9 |       INLIST ITERATOR                     |                 |       |       |            |          |
|  10 |        TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| CAT_ITEM        |    10 |    60 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 11 |         INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | CI_I1           |    10 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 12 |      INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                    | CC_PK           |     1 |       |     0   (0)|          |
|* 13 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID           | CAT_CONTACT     |     1 |   118 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   5 - access(("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A' OR "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B' OR
              "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C'))
  11 - access(("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y'))
  12 - access("I"."CONTACT_ID"="C"."CONTACT_ID")
  13 - filter((LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A') AND LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B') AND
              LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C')))

The optimizer has used the new “cost-based OR-expansion” transformation to rewrite the query as a UNION ALL query. We can see an efficient access into cat_contact to identify the ‘A’,’B’,’C’ rows, and then we can see that the second branch of the union all handles the existence subquery but the optimizer has unnested the subquery to select the 10 rows from cat_item where the item_category is ‘X’ or ‘Y’ and used those rows in a nested loop to drive into the cat_contact table using the primary key. We can also see the use of the lnnvl() function in operation 13 that ensures we don’t accidentally report the ‘A’,’B’,’C’ rows again.

So let’s go back to 12.2.0.1 and see what happens if we just add the /*+ or_expand(@main) */ hint to the query. Here’s the resulting execution plan:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                 | Name            | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                          |                 |       |       |    14 (100)|          |
|   1 |  VIEW                                     | VW_ORE_231AD113 |    13 |   962 |    14   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL                               |                 |       |       |            |          |
|   3 |    INLIST ITERATOR                        |                 |       |       |            |          |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED   | CAT_CONTACT     |     3 |   354 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                     | CC_I1           |     3 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |    NESTED LOOPS                           |                 |    10 |  1240 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     NESTED LOOPS                          |                 |    10 |  1240 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   8 |      SORT UNIQUE                          |                 |    10 |    60 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   9 |       INLIST ITERATOR                     |                 |       |       |            |          |
|  10 |        TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| CAT_ITEM        |    10 |    60 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 11 |         INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | CI_I1           |    10 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 12 |      INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                    | CC_PK           |     1 |       |     0   (0)|          |
|* 13 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID           | CAT_CONTACT     |     1 |   118 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   5 - access(("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A' OR "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B' OR
              "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C'))
  11 - access(("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y'))
  12 - access("I"."CONTACT_ID"="C"."CONTACT_ID")
  13 - filter((LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A') AND LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B') AND
              LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C')))

We get exactly the plan we want – with the same cost as the 19c cost, which happens to be less than half the cost of the default plan that we got from 12.2.0.1. So it looks like there may be case where you will need to hint OR-expansion because is might not appear by default.

Other Observations 1 – ordering

You may have noticed that my query has, unusually for me, put the existence subquery first and the simple filter predicate second in the where clause. I don’t like this pattern as (over time, and with different developers modifying queries) it’s too easy in more complex cases to “lose” the simple predicate; a one-liner can easily drift, change indents, get bracketed with another predicate that it shouldn’t be connected with and so on. I’ve actually seen production systems producing wrong results because little editing accidents like this (counting brackets is the classic error) have occured – so I’m going to rerun the test on 12.2.0.1 with the predicates in the order I would normally write them.

Here’s the “corrected” query with its execution plan:

SELECT  /*+ 
                qb_name(main) 
                or_expand(@main)
        */ 
        *  
FROM    cat_contact c  
WHERE   (
                c.contact_method_id IN ('A', 'B', 'C')  
        OR
                exists  (  
                        SELECT  /*+ qb_name(subq) */
                                *  
                        FROM    cat_item i  
                        WHERE   i.contact_id = c.contact_id  
                        AND     i.item_category in ('X', 'Y')  
                )
        )
;  


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                 | Name            | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                          |                 |       |       |    16 (100)|          |
|   1 |  VIEW                                     | VW_ORE_231AD113 |    13 |   962 |    16   (7)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL                               |                 |       |       |            |          |
|   3 |    NESTED LOOPS                           |                 |    10 |  1240 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     NESTED LOOPS                          |                 |    10 |  1240 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |      SORT UNIQUE                          |                 |    10 |    60 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |       INLIST ITERATOR                     |                 |       |       |            |          |
|   7 |        TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| CAT_ITEM        |    10 |    60 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |         INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | CI_I1           |    10 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  9 |      INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                    | CC_PK           |     1 |       |     0   (0)|          |
|  10 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID           | CAT_CONTACT     |     1 |   118 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 11 |    FILTER                                 |                 |       |       |            |          |
|  12 |     INLIST ITERATOR                       |                 |       |       |            |          |
|  13 |      TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED  | CAT_CONTACT     |     3 |   354 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 14 |       INDEX RANGE SCAN                    | CC_I1           |     3 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  15 |     INLIST ITERATOR                       |                 |       |       |            |          |
|* 16 |      INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                    | CI_PK           |     1 |     6 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   8 - access(("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y'))
   9 - access("I"."CONTACT_ID"="C"."CONTACT_ID")
  11 - filter(LNNVL( IS NOT NULL))
  14 - access(("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A' OR "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B' OR
              "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C'))
  16 - access("I"."CONTACT_ID"=:B1 AND (("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y')))

The execution plan has jumped from 14 lines to 17 lines, the cost has gone up from 14 to 16, and both branches of the plan now report access to cat_contact and cat_item (though only through its primary key index in the second branch). What’s happened?

Oracle 12.2.0.1 has rewritten the query as a UNION ALL working from the bottom up – so in this case the first branch of the rewrite handles the original filter subquery, unnesting it to drive efficient from cat_item to cat_contact. This means the second branch of the rewrite has to find the ‘A’,’B’,’C’ rows in cat_contact and then check that the filter subquery hadn’t previously reported them – so the optimizer has applied the lnnvl() function to the filter subquery – which you can nearly see in the Predicate Information for operation 11.

To make it clearer, here’s what you get as the predicate information for that operation after calling explain plan and dbms_xplan.display()

  11 - filter(LNNVL( EXISTS (SELECT /*+ QB_NAME ("SUBQ") */ 0 FROM "CAT_ITEM" "I" WHERE
              ("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y') AND "I"."CONTACT_ID"=:B1)))

In 12.2 the order of predicates in your query seems to be important – unless told otherwise the optimizer is working from the bottom-up (then rewriting top-down). But there is hope (though not documented hope). I added the /*+ or_expand(@main) */ hint to the query to force OR-expansion. Checking the Outline Information of the plan I could see that this had been expanded to /*+ or_expand(@main (1) (2)) */. Taking a wild guess as the significance of the numbers and changing the hint to /*+ or_expand(@main (2) (1) */ I re-ran the test and back to the more efficient plan – with the filter subquery branch appearing second in the UNION ALL view and the lnnvl() applied to the simpler predicate.

So the OR-expansion code is not fully cost-based in 12.2.0.1, but you can modify the behaviour through hinting. First to force it to appear (which may not happen even if it seems to be the lower cost option), and secondly to control the ordering of the components of the UNION ALL. As with all things relating to hints, though, act with extreme caution: we do not have sufficient documentation explaining exactly how they work, and with some of them we don’t even know whether the code path is even complete yet.

Other Observations 2 – 12cR1

The or_expand() hint and cost-based OR-expansion appeared specifically in 12.2.0.1; prior to that we had a similar option in the use_concat() hint and concatenation – which also attempts to rewrite your query to produce a union all of disjoint data sets. But there are restrictions on what concatentation can do. I rarely remember what all the restrictions are, but there are two critical restrictions:

• first, it will only appear by default if there is an indexed access path available to drive every branch of the rewrite
• secondly, it will not apply further transformations to the separate branches that it produces

If we try adding the or_expand() hint to our query in 12.1.0.2 it will have no effect, so let’s add a suitable use_concat() hint and see what happens:

explain plan for
SELECT  /*+ 
                qb_name(main) 
                use_concat(@main 8 or_predicates(1))
--              use_concat(@main   or_predicates(1))
        */ 
        *  
FROM    cat_contact c  
WHERE   (
                exists  (  
                        SELECT  /*+ qb_name(subq) */
                                *  
                        FROM    cat_item i  
                        WHERE   i.contact_id = c.contact_id  
                        AND     i.item_category in ('X', 'Y')  
                )
        OR
                c.contact_method_id IN ('A', 'B', 'C')  
        )
;  

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                             | Name        | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                      |             | 10000 |  1152K|    40   (3)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  CONCATENATION                        |             |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   INLIST ITERATOR                     |             |       |       |            |          |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| CAT_CONTACT |     3 |   354 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | CC_I1       |     3 |       |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |   FILTER                              |             |       |       |            |          |
|*  6 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | CAT_CONTACT |  9997 |  1151K|    35   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |    INLIST ITERATOR                    |             |       |       |            |          |
|*  8 |     INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                 | CI_PK       |     1 |     6 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - access("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A' OR "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B' OR
              "C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C')
   5 - filter( EXISTS (SELECT /*+ QB_NAME ("SUBQ") */ 0 FROM "CAT_ITEM" "I" WHERE
              ("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y') AND "I"."CONTACT_ID"=:B1))
   6 - filter(LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='A') AND LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='B') AND
              LNNVL("C"."CONTACT_METHOD_ID"='C'))
   8 - access("I"."CONTACT_ID"=:B1 AND ("I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='X' OR "I"."ITEM_CATEGORY"='Y'))

26 rows selected.

As you can see by forcing concatentation I’ve got my “union all” view with lnnvl() applied in the second branch. But the second branch was the “select where exists()” branch and the optimizer has not been able (allowed?) to do the unnesting that would let it drive efficiently from the cat_item table to the cat_contact table. The effect of this is that the plan still ends up with a full tablescan of cat_contact running a filter subquery on virtually every row- so concatenation doesn’t save us anything.

The significance of the “8” in the hint, by the way is (I believe) that it tells the optimizer to use inlist iterators when possible. If I had omitted the “8” the plan would have had 4 branches – one each for ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ and the fourth for the filter subquery. I could also have added a hint /*+ use_concat(@subq or_predicates(1)) */ to replace operations 7 and 8 with a single index range scan with a filter predicate for the ‘X’/’Y’ check (and that might, in any case, be slightly more efficient than the iteration approach).

Footnote(s)

The “legacy” OR-expansion (“concatenation” a.k.a. LORE in the optimizer trace file) can be controlled through the hints use_concat(), and no_expand().

The new cost-based OR-expansion (now ORE in the optimizer trace file) can be controlled through the hints or_expand() and no_or_expand().

The new cost-based OR-expansion has some restrictions, for example it is explicitly blocked in a MERGE statement, even in 19c, as reported in this blog note by Nenad Noveljic. As the blog note shows, concatenation is still possible but you (may) have to disable cost based OR-expansion.

I scanned the executable for the phrase “ORE: bypassed” to see if there were any messages that would suggest other reasons why cost-based OR-expansion would not be used; unfortunately the only relevant string was “ORE: bypassed – %s” [update (see comment 5 below): after ignoring case there was a second option: “ORE: Bypassed for disjunct chain: %s.”] – in other words all the possible bypass messages would be filled in on demand. I found a list of messages that might be relevant; I’d be a little cautious about trusting it but if you don’t see the feature appearing when you’re expecting it then it might be worth checking whether one of these could apply.

• Old OR expansion hints present
• Semi join hint present
• QB has FALSE predicate
• QB marked for NO Execution
• Full Outer join QB
• Rownum found in disjunction
• Anti/semi/outer join in disjunction
• Opposite Range in disjunction
• No Index or Partition driver found
• Predicate chain has all constant predicates
• Negated predicate found
• Long bitmap inlist in OR predicate
• PRIOR expression in OR predicate
• All 1-row tables found
• No valid predicate for OR expansion
• Disjunctive subquery unnesting possible
• Subquery unnesting possible
• Subquery coalesced query block
• Merge view query block

Finally – here’s another reference blog note comparing LORE with ORE from Mohamed Houri.