ANSI hinting

I’ve made casual remarks in the past about how “ANSI”-style SQL introduces extra complications in labelling or identifying query blocks – which means it’s harder to hint correctly. This is a note to show how the optimizer first transforms “ANSI” SQL into “Oracle” syntax. I’m going to write a simple 4-table join in classic Oracle form and check the execution plan with its query block names and fully qualified table aliases; then I’ll translate to the ANSI equivalent and repeat the check for query block names and aliases , finally I’ll rewrite the query in classic Oracle syntax that reproduces the query block names and fully qualified table aliases that we got from the ANSI form.

We start by creating and indexing 4 tables (with a script that I’ve been using for various tests for several years, but the results I’ll show come from 19c):

rem
rem     Script:         ansi_hint_3.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          June 2014
rem

create table t1
as
select 
        trunc((rownum-1)/4)     t1_n1,
        trunc((rownum-1)/4)     t1_n2,
        case mod(rownum,20) when 0 then rownum else -1 end      flagged1,
        rpad(rownum,180)        t1_v1
from all_objects 
where rownum <= 3000 --> comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

create table t2
as
select 
        mod(rownum,200)         t2_n1,
        mod(rownum,200)         t2_n2,
        case mod(rownum,20) when 0 then rownum else -1 end      flagged2,
        rpad(rownum,180)        t2_v1
from all_objects 
where rownum <= 3000 --> comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

create table t3
as
select 
        trunc((rownum-1)/4)     t3_n1,
        trunc((rownum-1)/4)     t3_n2,
        case mod(rownum,20) when 0 then rownum else -1 end      flagged3,
        rpad(rownum,180)        t3_v1
from all_objects 
where rownum <= 3000 --> comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

create table t4
as
select 
        trunc((rownum-1)/4)     t4_n1,
        trunc((rownum-1)/4)     t4_n2,
        case mod(rownum,20) when 0 then rownum else -1 end      flagged4,
        rpad(rownum,180)        t4_v1
from all_objects 
where rownum <= 3000 --> comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

create index t1_i1 on t1(t1_n1);
create index t2_i1 on t2(t2_n1);
create index t3_i1 on t3(t3_n1);
create index t4_i1 on t4(t4_n1);

Then we check the execution plan for a simple statement with what looks like a single named query block:

explain plan for
select
        /*+ qb_name(main) */
        *
from
        t1, t2, t3, t4
where
        t2.t2_n1 = t1.t1_n2
and     t3.t3_n1 = t2.t2_n2
and     t4.t4_n1 = t3.t3_n2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline alias'));

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 3619951144

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |   192K|   140M|    61  (22)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN           |      |   192K|   140M|    61  (22)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T4   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |   HASH JOIN          |      | 48000 |    26M|    41  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | T3   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    HASH JOIN         |      | 12000 |  4500K|    26   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |  3000 |   559K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - MAIN
   2 - MAIN / T4@MAIN
   4 - MAIN / T3@MAIN
   6 - MAIN / T2@MAIN
   7 - MAIN / T1@MAIN

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"MAIN" "T4"@"MAIN")
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"MAIN" "T3"@"MAIN")
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"MAIN" "T2"@"MAIN")
      USE_HASH(@"MAIN" "T4"@"MAIN")
      USE_HASH(@"MAIN" "T3"@"MAIN")
      USE_HASH(@"MAIN" "T2"@"MAIN")
      LEADING(@"MAIN" "T1"@"MAIN" "T2"@"MAIN" "T3"@"MAIN" "T4"@"MAIN")
      FULL(@"MAIN" "T4"@"MAIN")
      FULL(@"MAIN" "T3"@"MAIN")
      FULL(@"MAIN" "T2"@"MAIN")
      FULL(@"MAIN" "T1"@"MAIN")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"MAIN")
      ALL_ROWS
      DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T4"."T4_N1"="T3"."T3_N2")
   3 - access("T3"."T3_N1"="T2"."T2_N2")
   5 - access("T2"."T2_N1"="T1"."T1_N2")

Note in the Query Block Name / Object Alias information that all 4 tables were “sourced from”, or have aliases qualified by, “@MAIN”, and in the final plan all the tables are used in a query block called MAIN.

Now look at the basic ANSI equivalent:

explain plan for
select 
        /*+ qb_name(main) */
        *
from
        t1
join 
        t2
on      t2.t2_n1 = t1.t1_n2
join 
        t3
on      t3.t3_n1 = t2.t2_n2
join 
        t4
on      t4.t4_n1 = t3.t3_n2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline alias'));

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 3619951144

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |   192K|   140M|    61  (22)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN           |      |   192K|   140M|    61  (22)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T4   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |   HASH JOIN          |      | 48000 |    26M|    41  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | T3   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    HASH JOIN         |      | 12000 |  4500K|    26   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |  3000 |   559K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$43767242
   2 - SEL$43767242 / T4@SEL$3
   4 - SEL$43767242 / T3@SEL$2
   6 - SEL$43767242 / T2@SEL$1
   7 - SEL$43767242 / T1@SEL$1

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"SEL$43767242" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"SEL$43767242" "T3"@"SEL$2")
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"SEL$43767242" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$43767242" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$43767242" "T3"@"SEL$2")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$43767242" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$43767242" "T1"@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1" "T3"@"SEL$2" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T3"@"SEL$2")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T1"@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
      MERGE(@"SEL$1" >"SEL$2")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$58A6D7F6")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$3")
      MERGE(@"SEL$58A6D7F6" >"SEL$3")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$9E43CB6E")
      OUTLINE(@"MAIN")
      MERGE(@"SEL$9E43CB6E" >"MAIN")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$43767242")
      ALL_ROWS
      DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T4"."T4_N1"="T3"."T3_N2")
   3 - access("T3"."T3_N1"="T2"."T2_N2")
   5 - access("T2"."T2_N1"="T1"."T1_N2")

Check the Plan Hash Value – it gives you a strong clue that the execution plans are the same, and a close examination of the body of the plan and the Predicate information confirm that the two queries operate in exactly the same way at exactly the same cost. But there’s a significant difference in the query blocks and table aliases.

The Query Block Name / Alias Alias information tells us that query block “main” has disappeared and the query operates completely from a query block with the internally generated name SEL$43767242; moreover we can see that tables t1 and t2 appear to be sourced from a query block called sel$1, while t3 comes from sel$2 and t4 comes from sel$3.

Finally here’s a messy Oracle form to reproduce the ANSI query block names and table aliases:

explain plan for
select  /*+ qb_name(main) */
        *
from    (
        select  /*+ qb_name(sel$3) */
                *
        from
                (
                select  /*+ qb_name(sel$2) */
                        *
                from    (
                        select 
                                /*+ qb_name(sel$1) */
                                *
                        from    
                                t1,
                                t2
                        where   t2.t2_n1 = t1.t1_n2
                        ) v1,
                        t3
                where   t3.t3_n1 = v1.t2_n2
                )       v2,
                t4
        where   t4.t4_n1 = v2.t3_n2
        )
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline alias'));

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 3619951144

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |   192K|   140M|    61  (22)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN           |      |   192K|   140M|    61  (22)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T4   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |   HASH JOIN          |      | 48000 |    26M|    41  (13)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | T3   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    HASH JOIN         |      | 12000 |  4500K|    26   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |  3000 |   559K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 |   565K|    13   (8)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$43767242
   2 - SEL$43767242 / T4@SEL$3
   4 - SEL$43767242 / T3@SEL$2
   6 - SEL$43767242 / T2@SEL$1
   7 - SEL$43767242 / T1@SEL$1

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"SEL$43767242" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"SEL$43767242" "T3"@"SEL$2")
      SWAP_JOIN_INPUTS(@"SEL$43767242" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$43767242" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$43767242" "T3"@"SEL$2")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$43767242" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$43767242" "T1"@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1" "T3"@"SEL$2"
              "T4"@"SEL$3")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T4"@"SEL$3")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T3"@"SEL$2")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$43767242" "T1"@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
      MERGE(@"SEL$1" >"SEL$2")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$58A6D7F6")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$3")
      MERGE(@"SEL$58A6D7F6" >"SEL$3")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$9E43CB6E")
      OUTLINE(@"MAIN")
      MERGE(@"SEL$9E43CB6E" >"MAIN")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$43767242")
      ALL_ROWS
      DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T4"."T4_N1"="T3"."T3_N2")
   3 - access("T3"."T3_N1"="T2"."T2_N2")
   5 - access("T2"."T2_N1"="T1"."T1_N2")

Again a quick check of the Plan Hash Value confirms that the messier query is a match for the previous query with its ANSI transformation, and the plan body and Query Block Name / Object Alias information confirm the match throughout in the naming.

Any time you write ANSI syntax this layering of nested inline views is what happens to your query before any other transformation is applied – and sometimes (though very rarely in recent versions of Oracle) this can result in unexpected limitations in the way the optimizer subsequently transforms the query.

Apart from “accidents”, though, the big issue with the “ANSI rewrite” comes from the side effects of all the extra query blocks. In anything but the simplest cases you have to work a little harder to figure out the query block names you need to use if you want to apply hints to fix an optimizer problem – you can’t create your own meaningful names for every query block in the query you wrote. Fortunately this task is made a little easier if you check the execution plan of the query after adding the hint /*+ no_query_transformation */, as this tends to produce a plan that looks like a step by step “translation” of the way the query was written (apart from the ANSI transformation, of course). This might be enough to identify the base-level query blocks that the optimizer starts with when you use ANSI syntax.

 

Fake Baselines – 2

Many years ago (2011) I wrote a note describing how you could attach the Outline Information from one query to the SQL_ID of another query using the official Oracle mechanism of calling dbms_spm.load_plans_from_cursor_cache(). Shortly after publishing that note I drafted a follow-up note with an example demonstrating that even when the alternative outline was technically relevant the optimizer might still fail to use the SQL Plan Baseline. Unfortunately I didn’t quite finish the draft – until today.

The example I started with nearly 10 years ago behaved correctly against 11.1.0.7, but failed to reproduce the plan when I tested it against 11.2.0.3, and it still fails against 19.3.0.0. Here’s the test data and the query we’re going to attempt to manipulate:

rem
rem     Script:         fake_sql_baseline_4.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Oct 2010
rem

create table emp1 (
        dept_no         number /* not null */,
        sal             number,
        emp_no          number,
        padding         varchar2(200),
        constraint e1_pk primary key(emp_no)
)
;

create table emp2 (
        dept_no         number /* not null */,
        sal             number,
        emp_no          number,
        padding         varchar2(200),
        constraint e2_pk primary key(emp_no)
)
;

insert into emp1
select
        mod(rownum,6),
        rownum,
        rownum,
        rpad('x',200)
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 20000 -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

insert into emp2
select
        mod(rownum,6),
        rownum,
        rownum,
        rpad('x',200)
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 20000 -- > comment to avoid wordpress format issue
;

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname                 => user,
                tabname                 => 'EMP1',
                cascade                 => true,
                method_opt              =>'for all columns size 1'
        );

        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname                 => user,
                tabname                 => 'EMP2',
                cascade                 => true,
                method_opt              =>'for all columns size 1'
        );
end;
/

select
        /*+ target_query */
        count(*)
from
        emp1
where
        emp1.dept_no not in (
                select  dept_no
                from    emp2
        )
;

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

I haven’t included the code I run on my testbed to delete all existing SQL Plan Baselines before running this test, I’ll post that at the end of the article.

The query is very simple and will, of course, return no rows since emp1 and emp2 are identical and we’re looking for departments in emp1 that don’t appear in emp2. The “obvious” plan for the optimizer is to unnest the subquery into a distinct (i.e. aggregate) inline view then apply an anti-join. It’s possible that the optimizer will also decide to do complex view merging and postpone the aggregation. Here’s the execution plan from 19.3:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |      |       |       |   168 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE     |      |     1 |     6 |            |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN ANTI NA |      |  3333 | 19998 |   168   (5)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP1 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP2 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("EMP1"."DEPT_NO"="DEPT_NO")

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):

Total hints for statement: 1 (E - Syntax error (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0 -  SEL$1
         E -  target_query

As expected the subquery unnested, we have the anti-join (in this case, since dept_no can be null, it’s a “Null-Aware” antijoin); and the optimizer has, indeed, decided to do the join before the aggregation.

Assume, now, that for reasons known only to me a merge (anti-)join would be more effective than a hash join. To get the optimizer to do this I’m going to capture the query and connect it to a plan that uses a merge join. There are several minor variations on how we could do this, but I’m going to follow the steps I took in 2011 – but cut out a couple of the steps where I loaded redundant baselines into the SMB (SQLPlan Management Base). As a starting point I’ll just record the sql_id and plan_hash_value for the query (and the child_number just in case I want to use dbms_xplan.display_cursor() to report the in-memory execution plan):

column  sql_id                  new_value       m_sql_id_1
column  plan_hash_value         new_value       m_plan_hash_value_1
column  child_number            new_value       m_child_number_1

select
        sql_id, plan_hash_value, child_number
from
        v$sql
where
        sql_text like '%target_query%'
and     sql_text not like '%v$sql%'
and     rownum = 1
;

Now I’ll hack the query to produce a plan that does the merge join. An easy first step is to look at the current outline and take advantage of the hints there. You’ll notice I included the ‘outline’ format in my call to dbms_xplan.display_cursor() above, even though I didn’t show you that part of the output – here it is now:

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$5DA710D3")
      UNNEST(@"SEL$2")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
      FULL(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP1"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
      LEADING(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP1"@"SEL$1" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

So I’m going to take the useful-looking hints, get rid of the use_hash() hint and, for good measure, turn it into a no_use_hash() hint. Here’s the resulting query, with its execution plan:

select
        /*+
                unnest(@sel$2)
                leading(@sel$5da710d3 emp1@sel$1 emp2@sel$2)
                no_use_hash(@sel$5da710d3 emp2@sel$2)
                full(@sel$5da710d3 emp2@sel$2)
                full(@sel$5da710d3 emp1@sel$1)
                alternate_query
        */
        count(*)
from
        emp1
where
        emp1.dept_no not in (
                select  dept_no
                from    emp2
        )
;

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |       |       |   178 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |      |     1 |     6 |            |          |
|   2 |   MERGE JOIN ANTI NA |      |  3333 | 19998 |   178  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    SORT JOIN         |      | 20000 | 60000 |    89  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP1 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    SORT UNIQUE       |      | 20000 | 60000 |    89  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP2 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   5 - access("EMP1"."DEPT_NO"="DEPT_NO")
       filter("EMP1"."DEPT_NO"="DEPT_NO")

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$5DA710D3")
      UNNEST(@"SEL$2")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
      FULL(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP1"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
      LEADING(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP1"@"SEL$1" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
      USE_MERGE(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 1 (E - Syntax error (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0 -  SEL$1
         E -  alternate_query

Note that I’ve included the text “alternative_query” at the end of the hint list as something to use when I’m searaching v$sql. Note also, that the “no_use_hash()” hint has disappeared and been replaced by “use_merge()” hint.

The plan tells us that the optimizer is happy to use a “merge join anti NA”, so we can load this plan’s outline into the SMB by combining the sql_id and plan_hash_value for this query with (for older versions of Oracle, though you can now use the sql_id in recent versions) the text of the previous query so that we can store the old text with the new plan.

column  sql_id                  new_value       m_sql_id_2
column  plan_hash_value         new_value       m_plan_hash_value_2
column  child_number            new_value       m_child_number_2

select
        sql_id, plan_hash_value, child_number
from
        v$sql
where
        sql_text like '%alternate_query%'
and     sql_text not like '%v$sql%'
and     rownum = 1
;

declare
        m_clob  clob;
begin
        select
                sql_fulltext
        into
                m_clob
        from
                v$sql
        where
                sql_id = '&m_sql_id_1'
        and     child_number = &m_child_number_1
        ;

        dbms_output.put_line(m_clob);

        dbms_output.put_line(
                'Number of plans loaded: ' ||
                dbms_spm.load_plans_from_cursor_cache(
                        sql_id                  => '&m_sql_id_2',
                        plan_hash_value         => &m_plan_hash_value_2,
                        sql_text                => m_clob,
                        fixed                   => 'YES',
                        enabled                 => 'YES'
                )
        );

end;
/

At this point we have one SQL Plan Baseline in the SMB, and it says the old query should execute usng the new plan. So let’s give it a go:

set serveroutput off
alter system flush shared_pool;

alter session set events '10053 trace name context forever';

select
        /*+ target_query */
        count(*)
from
        emp1
where
        emp1.dept_no not in (
                select  dept_no
                from    emp2
        )
/

alter session set events '10053 trace name context off';

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(null, null, 'alias outline'));

I’ve enabled the 10053 (optimizer) trace so that I can report a critical few lines from it later on. Here’s the execution plan, omitting the outline but including the alias information.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |      |       |       |   168 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE     |      |     1 |     6 |            |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN ANTI NA |      |  3333 | 19998 |   168   (5)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP1 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP2 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$5DA710D3
   3 - SEL$5DA710D3 / EMP1@SEL$1
   4 - SEL$5DA710D3 / EMP2@SEL$2

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("EMP1"."DEPT_NO"="DEPT_NO")

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 1 (E - Syntax error (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0 -  SEL$1
         E -  target_query

Note
-----
   - Failed to use SQL plan baseline for this statement

We haven’t used the SQL Plan Baseline – and in 19.3 we even have a note that the optimizer knew there was at least one baseline available that it failed to use! So what went wrong?

I have two diagnostics – first is the content of the baseline itself (warning – the SQL below will report ALL currently saved SQL Plan Baselines); I’ve just made sure that I have only one to report:

set linesize 90

select
        pln.*
from
        (select sql_handle, plan_name
         from   dba_sql_plan_baselines spb
         order by
                sql_handle, plan_name
        ) spb,
        table(dbms_xplan.display_sql_plan_baseline(spb.sql_handle, spb.plan_name)) pln
;


PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL handle: SQL_ce3099e9e3bdaf2f
SQL text: select         /*+ target_query */         count(*) from         emp1
          where         emp1.dept_no not in (                 select  dept_no
                        from    emp2         )
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan name: SQL_PLAN_cwc4tx7jvvbtg02bb0c12         Plan id: 45812754
Enabled: YES     Fixed: YES     Accepted: YES     Origin: MANUAL-LOAD-FROM-CURSOR-CACHE
Plan rows: From dictionary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Plan hash value: 1517539632

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      |       |       |   178 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |      |     1 |     6 |            |          |
|   2 |   MERGE JOIN ANTI NA |      |  3333 | 19998 |   178  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    SORT JOIN         |      | 20000 | 60000 |    89  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP1 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    SORT UNIQUE       |      | 20000 | 60000 |    89  (11)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP2 | 20000 | 60000 |    83   (4)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   5 - access("EMP1"."DEPT_NO"="DEPT_NO")
       filter("EMP1"."DEPT_NO"="DEPT_NO")

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 1 (E - Syntax error (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0 -  SEL$1
         E -  alternate_query

We have an SQL Plan baseline that is accepted, enabled, and fixed; and it’s supposed to produce a “merge join anti NA”, and it clearly “belongs” to our query. So it should have been used.

Then we have the 10053 trace file, in which we find the following:

SPM: planId in plan baseline = 45812754, planId of reproduced plan = 1410137244
------- START SPM Plan Dump -------
SPM: failed to reproduce the plan using the following info:
  parse_schema name        : TEST_USER
  plan_baseline signature  : 14857544400522555183
  plan_baseline plan_id    : 45812754
  plan_baseline hintset    :
    hint num  1 len 27 text: IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
    hint num  2 len 35 text: OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
    hint num  3 len 20 text: DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
    hint num  4 len  8 text: ALL_ROWS
    hint num  5 len 29 text: OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$5DA710D3")
    hint num  6 len 16 text: UNNEST(@"SEL$2")
    hint num  7 len 17 text: OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
    hint num  8 len 17 text: OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
    hint num  9 len 36 text: FULL(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP1"@"SEL$1")
    hint num 10 len 36 text: FULL(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
    hint num 11 len 54 text: LEADING(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP1"@"SEL$1" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")
    hint num 12 len 41 text: USE_MERGE(@"SEL$5DA710D3" "EMP2"@"SEL$2")

During optimization the optimizer has found that SQL Plan Baseline. We can see that the hints in the baseline are exactly the hints from the plan that we wanted – but the optimizer says it can’t reproduce the plan we wanted. In fact if you try adding exactly these hints to the query itself you’ll still find that the merge join won’t appear and Oracle will use a hash join.

Conclusion

This is just a simple example of how the optimizer may be able to produce a plan if hinted in one way, but the outline consists of a different set of hints that won’t reproduce the plan they describe. My no_use_hash() has turned into a use_merge() but that hint fails to reproduce the merge join in circumstances that makes me think there’s a bug in the optimizer.

If you happen to be unlucky you may find that the plan you really need to see can’t be forced through a SQL Plan Baseline. In this example it may be necessary to use the SQL Patch mechanism to include the no_use_hash() hint in a set of hints that I associate with the query.

 

Collection limitation

The ODC SQL and PL/SQL forum came up with an example a couple of days ago that highlighted an annoying limitation in the optimizer’s handling of table functions. The requirement was for a piece of SQL that would generate “installments” information from a table of contract agreements and insert into another table any installments that were not yet recorded there.

The mechanism to turn a single row of contract data into a set of installments was a (optionally pipelined) table function that involved some business logic that (presumably) dealt with the timing and size of the installments. The final SQL to create the data that needed to be inserted was reported as follows (though it had clearly been somewhat modified):

select 
        y.*,
        trunc(sysdate,'mm'),
        user
from 
        table_a a
join 
        table(
                my_function(
                        a.loan_acct_nbr, 
                        a.start_dt,
                        a.maturity_dt,
                        a.num_of_terms
                )
        ) y
on 
        a.loan_acct_nbr = y.loan_acct_nbr
where 
        a.yr_mnth_cd = to_char(add_months(sysdate,-1),'yyyymm')       -- last month
and     a.loan_typ   = 'ABC'
and     not exists ( 
                select  1 
                from
                        final_load_table l
                where
                        l.loan_acct_nbr = y.loan_acct_nbr
                and     l.yr_mnth_cd    = y.yr_mnth_cd 
        )
;

In this query, table_a is the set of contracts, final_load_table is the set of installments, and my_function() is the pipelined function returning a table of installments derived from the start date, maturity date, and number of installments for a contract. The query needs a “not exists” subquery to eliminate any installments that are already known to the database. Once this query is operating efficiently it could be used either to drive a PL/SQL loop or (generally the better strategy) to do a simple “insert as select”.

We were told that the function would return around 60 rows per contract; that the starting size of the final_load_table would be about 60M rows, and the size of the result set from the initial join would be about 60M or 70M rows (which suggests about 1M rows acquired from table_a).

The owner of this problem seemed to be saying that the query had returned no data after 4 or 5 hours – which suggests (a) the optimizer chose a bad plan and/or (b) the PL/SQL function is working very inefficiently and/or (c) the join had generated a vast amount of data but the effect of the subquery was to discard all of it .

Clearly we needed to see an execution plan (preferably from SQL Monitor) and be given have some idea of how much of the 60M/70M rows predicted for the join would be discarded because it already existed.

The owner did send us an execution plan – which included a very obvious threat and suggested a couple of optimizer errors – but supplied it as a picture rather than a flat text.

You’ll notice, of course, that the tables and columns have changed from the original statement. More significantly, though, there are serious problems with the numbers – the estimated row count for the basic join is only 5,326 rather than 50 Million which, at first sight, is probably why the optimizer has decided that a filter subquery (operation 1) to do an index-only probe (operation 5) is a good way of handling the subquery. Perhaps if the estimates had been a little more accurate (e.g. through the addition of a couple of column groups or, if necessary, by opt_estimate() or cardinality() hints) the subquery would have been unnested and turned into a hash anti-join.

I suggested a quick test of a suitable cardinality() hint – but ran up a little model to check that I’d got the hint right – and found that I had but it wasn’t going to help. So I decided to write up the model (and a possible solution for the owner of the problem) in this blog note.

Here’s the code to create the set of objects I’m going to work with. The naming follows the naming in the original statement of the problem suggested by the owner:

rem
rem     Script:         table_function_plan.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Jan 2020
rem     Purpose:        
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem             12.2.0.1
rem

create table table_a (
        loan_acct_nbr   number,
        yr_mnth_cd      varchar2(6),
        start_dt        date,
        maturity_dt     date    ,
        number_of_terms number,
        constraint ta_pk primary key(loan_acct_nbr, yr_mnth_cd)
)
;

execute dbms_random.seed(0)

insert /*+ append */
into    table_a
with generator as (
        select rownum id
        from    dual
        connect by
                level <= 4000 -- > comment to avoid wordpress issue
)
select
        trunc(dbms_random.value(1e9, 2e9)),
        to_char(sysdate-(365-mod(rownum,365)),'yyyymm'),
        sysdate-(365-mod(rownum,365)),
        sysdate+(1500+mod(rownum,365)),
        60
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

create table final_load_table_l(
        loan_acct_nbr   number,
        yr_mnth_cd      varchar2(6),
        v1              varchar2(10),
        padding         varchar2(200),
        constraint lt_pk primary key(loan_acct_nbr, yr_mnth_cd)
)
;

insert /*+ append */ into final_load_table_l
with generator as (
        select rownum id
        from    dual
        connect by
                level <= 4000 -- > comment to avoid wordpress issue
)
select
        trunc(dbms_random.value(1e9, 2e9)),
        to_char(sysdate-(365-mod(rownum,365)),'yyyymm'),
        lpad(rownum,10),
        lpad('x',200,'x')
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;


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

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

create type my_row_type as object (
        loan_acct_nbr   number,
        yr_mnth_cd      varchar2(6),
        v1              varchar2(10),
        padding         varchar2(200)
);
/

create type my_table_type as table of my_row_type;
/

create  or replace function my_function (
        i_loan_acct_nbr         in      number,
        i_yr_mnth_cd            in      varchar2,
        i_start_dt              in      date,
        i_maturity_dt           in      date,
        i_number_of_terms       in      number
)       return  my_table_type pipelined
as
begin
        for i in 1..i_number_of_terms loop
                pipe row (
                        my_row_type(
                                i_loan_acct_nbr,
                                to_char(i_start_dt+32*i,'yyyymm'),
                                i,
                                lpad('x',200,'x')
                        )
                );
        end loop;
        return;
end;
/

I was planning to create some large tables – hence the option to generate 16M rows from my generator CTEs – but I discovered the critical problem almost as soon as I had some data and code in place, so I didn’t need to go large.

I’ve had to create an object type and table type in order to create a pipelined function that returns the table type by piping rows of the object type. The data I’ve created, and the way the function generates data probably doesn’t bear much resemblance to the real system of course, but I don’t think it needs to be very close to make the crucial point.

Here’s the text of the select statement the OP wants to run, with the execution plan I got from my data set after running the query and pulling the plan from memory:

alter session set statistics_level = all;

select 
        /*+ find this 1 */
        y.* 
from 
        table_a a, 
        table(my_function(
                a.loan_acct_nbr,
                a.yr_mnth_cd,
                a.start_dt,
                a.maturity_dt,
                a.number_of_terms
        )) y
where 
        a.yr_mnth_cd = '202001'
and     not exists (
                select  
                        /*+ unnest */
                        null
                from    final_load_table_l l
                where   l.loan_acct_nbr = y.loan_acct_nbr
                and     l.yr_mnth_cd    = y.yr_mnth_cd
        )
;

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                           | Name        | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                    |             |      1 |        |  5059K(100)|  14580 |00:00:00.15 |   16330 |
|*  1 |  FILTER                             |             |      1 |        |            |  14580 |00:00:00.15 |   16330 |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS                      |             |      1 |   6283K| 10421   (8)|  14580 |00:00:00.11 |     335 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL                | TABLE_A     |      1 |    769 |    10  (10)|    243 |00:00:00.01 |     297 |
|   4 |    COLLECTION ITERATOR PICKLER FETCH| MY_FUNCTION |    243 |   8168 |    14   (8)|  14580 |00:00:00.10 |      38 |
|*  5 |   INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                 | LT_PK       |  14580 |      1 |     1   (0)|      0 |00:00:00.02 |   15995 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter( IS NULL)
   3 - filter("A"."YR_MNTH_CD"='202001')
   5 - access("L"."LOAN_ACCT_NBR"=:B1 AND "L"."YR_MNTH_CD"=:B2)

I’ve put in a hint to tell the optimizer to unnest the subquery – and it didn’t. Oracle does not ignore hints (unless they’re illegal, or out of context, or the optimizer never got to them, or you’ve found a bug) so why did Oracle appear to ignore this hint? There’s a really nice feature in 19.3 execution plans – you can request a hint report for a plan, and here’s the hint report for this query (ignore the bits about “find this” being an error):

Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 3 (U - Unused (1), E - Syntax error (2))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   0 -  SEL$1
         E -  find
         E -  this

   5 -  SEL$3
         U -  unnest / Invalid correlated predicates

I put in an /*+ unnest */ hint to unnest the subquery, and I’ve been told that the predicates are not valid. The only thing about them that could be invalid is that they come from a pipelined function that has returned an object type. The pipelined function does not behave exactly like a table. But this gives me a clue about forcing the unnest to happen – hide the pipelined function inside a non-mergeable view.

select
        /*+ find this 2 */
        v.*
from    (
        select  /*+ no_merge */
                y.* 
        from 
                table_a a, 
                table(my_function(
                        a.loan_acct_nbr,
                        a.yr_mnth_cd,
                        a.start_dt,
                        a.maturity_dt,
                        a.number_of_terms
                )) y
        where 
                a.yr_mnth_cd = '202001'
        )       v
where   not exists (
                select
                        /*+ unnest */
                        null
                from    final_load_table_l l
                where   l.loan_acct_nbr = v.loan_acct_nbr
                and     l.yr_mnth_cd    = v.yr_mnth_cd
        )
/


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name        | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |             |      1 |        | 10628 (100)|  14580 |00:00:00.12 |     387 |       |       |          |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN RIGHT ANTI                |             |      1 |   6283K| 10628  (10)|  14580 |00:00:00.12 |     387 |  1878K|  1878K| 2156K (0)|
|   2 |   INDEX FAST FULL SCAN               | LT_PK       |      1 |  10000 |     6  (17)|  10000 |00:00:00.01 |      91 |       |       |          |
|   3 |   VIEW                               |             |      1 |   6283K| 10371   (8)|  14580 |00:00:00.11 |     296 |       |       |          |
|   4 |    NESTED LOOPS                      |             |      1 |   6283K| 10371   (8)|  14580 |00:00:00.10 |     296 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL                | TABLE_A     |      1 |    769 |    10  (10)|    243 |00:00:00.01 |     296 |       |       |          |
|   6 |     COLLECTION ITERATOR PICKLER FETCH| MY_FUNCTION |    243 |   8168 |    13   (0)|  14580 |00:00:00.10 |       0 |       |       |          |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("L"."LOAN_ACCT_NBR"="V"."LOAN_ACCT_NBR" AND "L"."YR_MNTH_CD"="V"."YR_MNTH_CD")
   5 - filter("A"."YR_MNTH_CD"='202001')

I’ve wrapped the basic join between table_a and the table function in an inline view called (unimaginatively) v, and I’ve added a /*+ no_merge */ hint to that inline view. So the main query becomes a select from a non-mergeable view with a “not exists” subquery applied to a couple of view columns. And Oracle thinks that that’s okay – and my unnest hint encouraged the optimizer to use a hash anti-join.

So here’s an option for the owner of the problem – but with a few outstanding questions: will a rewrite of their query in this form do the same, will the performance of the select be good enough, and will the subsequent “insert as select” keep the same driving plan.

There’s one significant detail to worry about: the build table in this hash (anti-)join is going to be constructed from 50M (load_acct_bfr, yr_mnth_cd) pairs – which means the workarea requirement is likely to be about 1.2GB for an optimial (i.e. in-memory) hash join; otherwise the join may spill to disc and do a lot of I/O – probably as a one-pass hash join.

(Did you notice,by the way, that the word storage appeared at operation 3 in the original plan?  That suggests a nice big Exadata box; however, there’s no storage predicate in the Predicate Information section for that operation and you would have thought that lease_type = ‘US_SSP’ would be pushed to storage, so maybe this is a ZFS Pillar backing a less exotic server.)

Conclusion

Some (if not all) types of correlated subqueries behave badly if the correlation predicates involve table functions. But you may be able to work around the issue by hiding part of the query, including the table function, inside a non-mergeable inline view before applying the subquery to the view.

Footnote

When I realised that the table function was causing a problem unnesting I remembered that I had written about a similar problem a few years ago – after searching for a little while I discovered a draft note that I had started in September 2015 but had not quite finished; so I’ll be finishing it off and publishing it some time in the next few days. (Update: now published)

 

 

push_having_to_gby() – 2

The problem with finding something new and fiddling with it and checking to see how you can best use it to advantage is that you sometimes manage to “break” it very quickly. In yesterday’s blog note I introduced the /*+ push_having_to_gby(@qbname) */ hint and explained why it was a useful little enhancement. I also showed a funny little glitch with a missing predicate in the execution plan.

Today I thought I’d do something a little more complex with the example I produced yesterday, and I’ve ended up with a little note that’s not actually about the hint, it’s about something that appeared in my initial testing of the hint, and then broke when I pushed it a little further. Here’s a script to create data for the new test:

rem
rem     Script:         push_having_2.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Dec 2019
rem     Purpose:        
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

create table t1
nologging
as
with generator as (
        select 
                rownum id
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
)
select
        rownum                          id,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')             v1,
        lpad('x',50,'x')                padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e6 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

insert into t1 values (2, lpad(2,10,'0'), lpad('x',50,'x'));
commit;

alter table t1 modify id not null;
create index t1_i1 on t1(id) nologging;

create table t2 as select * from t1;
create index t2_i1 on t2(id) nologging;

I’ve created two tables here, one a clone of the other, with one id value out of 1 million having two rows. As we saw yesterday it’s quite simple to write some SQL that uses an index full scan on the t1_i1 index to check for duplicate id values without doing a massive sort or hash aggregation:

set serveroutput off
alter session set statistics_level = all;

select
        /*+
                qb_name(driver)
                index(@driver t1@driver)
        */
        id 
from
        t1
where   id is not null
group by 
        id 
having  
        count(1) > 1
;

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


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |       |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.87 |    2229 |   2228 |
|   1 |  SORT GROUP BY NOSORT|       |      1 |  50000 |      1 |00:00:00.87 |    2229 |   2228 |
|   2 |   INDEX FULL SCAN    | T1_I1 |      1 |   1000K|   1000K|00:00:00.40 |    2229 |   2228 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As we saw yesterday this plan simply walks the index in order keeping track of a “running count” and doesn’t allocate a large PGA to sort a million rows of data, but there’s no asterisk by any operation telling us that there’s a predicate being checked, and no Predicate Information section to report the “count(1) > 1” predicate that we know exists (and is used, since the query produces the right answer).

Having ascertained that there is one duplicated id in the table, let’s join to the (clone) t2 table to list the rows for that id – and lets use the initial query as an inline view:

select
        /*+ 
                qb_name(main)
        */
        t2.v1
from    (
        select
                /*+
                        qb_name(driver)
                        index(@driver t1@driver)
                        no_use_hash_aggregation(@driver)
                */
                id 
        from
                t1
        where   id is not null
        group by 
                id 
        having  
                count(1) > 1
        )                       v1,
        t2
where
        t2.id = v1.id
;

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                    | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |       |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.76 |    2234 |     87 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                |       |      1 |  50000 |      2 |00:00:00.76 |    2234 |     87 |       |       |          |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS               |       |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.75 |    2232 |     28 |       |       |          |
|   3 |    VIEW                      |       |      1 |  50000 |      1 |00:00:00.75 |    2228 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  4 |     SORT GROUP BY            |       |      1 |  50000 |      1 |00:00:00.75 |    2228 |      0 |    53M|  2539K|   47M (0)|
|   5 |      INDEX FULL SCAN         | T1_I1 |      1 |   1000K|   1000K|00:00:00.26 |    2228 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  6 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | T2_I1 |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       4 |     28 |       |       |          |
|   7 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T2    |      2 |      1 |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |     59 |       |       |          |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter(COUNT(*)>1)
   6 - access("T2"."ID"="V1"."ID")

As you can see from this plan, I didn’t get the “sort group by nosort” that I wanted – even though the inline view was not merged. In fact, you’ll notice the /*+ no_use_hash_aggregation() */ hint I had to include to get a sort group by rather than a hash group by. The logic behind resolving this query block changed significantly when it went into a more complex query.

Having tried adding several other hints (blocking nlj_prefetch, nlj_batching, batched index access, setting cardinality to 1, first_rows(1) optimisation) I finally came down to using a materialized CTE (common table expression / “with” subquery):

with v1 as (
        select
                /*+
                        qb_name(driver)
                        index(@driver t1@driver)
                        materialize
                */
                id 
        from
                t1
        where
                id is not null
        group by 
                id 
        having  
                count(1) > 1
)
select
        /*+ 
                qb_name(main)
        */
        t2.v1
from    
        v1,
        t2
where
        t2.id = v1.id
;

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                | Name                       | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                         |                            |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.86 |    2236 |
|   1 |  TEMP TABLE TRANSFORMATION               |                            |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.86 |    2236 |
|   2 |   LOAD AS SELECT (CURSOR DURATION MEMORY)| SYS_TEMP_0FD9D66F8_E3B235A |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.86 |    2229 |
|   3 |    SORT GROUP BY NOSORT                  |                            |      1 |  50000 |      1 |00:00:00.86 |    2228 |
|   4 |     INDEX FULL SCAN                      | T1_I1                      |      1 |   1000K|   1000K|00:00:00.39 |    2228 |
|   5 |   NESTED LOOPS                           |                            |      1 |  50000 |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       6 |
|   6 |    NESTED LOOPS                          |                            |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       4 |
|   7 |     VIEW                                 |                            |      1 |  50000 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|   8 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                   | SYS_TEMP_0FD9D66F8_E3B235A |      1 |  50000 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|*  9 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN                     | T2_I1                      |      1 |        |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       4 |
|  10 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID           | T2                         |      2 |      1 |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   9 - access("T2"."ID"="V1"."ID")

You’ll notice that the hinting is back to the bare minimum – with only the addition of the /*+ materialize */ hint in the CTE. You’ll also notice that the “count(1) > 1” predicate is still missing. But critically we do have the index full scan leading into a sort group by nosort and no huge memory allocation.

The price we have to pay is that we do direct path writes to the temporary tablespace to materialize the CTE and db file scattered reads to read the data back. But since this example is aimed at a large data set returning a small result set this may be a highly appropriate trade off.

It’s possible that a detailed examination of the 10053 trace file would give us a clue about why Oracle can find the sort group by nosort when the query block is a materialized CTE but not when it’s an inline view – but I’m happy to leave that investigation to someone else and just leave this here as a warning that sometimes (even in 19c) there’s a difference between a non-merged view path and a materizlied subquery path.

 

ANSI Plans

Here’s a thought that falls somewhere between philosophical and pragmatic. It came up while I was playing around with a problem from the Oracle database forum that was asking about options for rewriting a query with a certain type of predicate. This note isn’t really about that question but the OP supplied a convenient script to demonstrate their requirement and I’ve hi-jacked most of the code for my own purposes so that I can ask the question:

Should the presence of an intermediate view name generated by the optimizer in the course of cost-based query transformation cause two plans, which are otherwise identical and do exactly the same thing, to have different plan hash values ?

To demonstrate the issue let’s start with a simple script to create some data and generate an execution plan.

rem
rem     Script:         or_expand_plans.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated           Oct 2019
rem
rem     Last tested
rem             19.3.0.0
rem             12.2.0.1
rem
rem     Notes:
rem     Data creation copied from ODC
rem     https://community.oracle.com/thread/4297365
rem

create table t as   
select 1 as id, to_date('2019-10-11', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Toronto' as place from dual  
union all  
select 2 as id, to_date('2019-10-12', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Toronto' as place from dual  
union all  
select 3 as id, to_date('2019-10-15', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Toronto' as place from dual  
union all  
select 4 as id, to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Toronto' as place from dual  
;  

create table t_others as  
select 1 as id, to_date('2019-10-12', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Blue'  as color, 'Zone 7' as zoneid from dual  
union all  
select 2 as id, to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Red'   as color, 'Zone 7' as zoneid from dual  
union all  
select 3 as id, to_date('2019-10-16', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'White' as color, 'Zone 7' as zoneid from dual  
union all  
select 4 as id, to_date('2019-10-17', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'Green' as color, 'Zone 7' as zoneid from dual  
;  

create table t_further_info as  
select 1 as id, to_date('2019-10-12', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'A' as typeinfo from dual  
union all   
select 2 as id, to_date('2019-10-14', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'C' as typeinfo from dual  
union all  
select 3 as id, to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'D' as typeinfo from dual  
union all  
select 4 as id, to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD') as lastupdated, 'E' as typeinfo from dual  
;  

prompt  ====================
prompt  "Traditional" syntax
prompt  ====================

explain plan for
select 
        /*+ or_expand */ 
        * 
from
        t,
        t_others        pt,
        t_further_info  fi  
/*
where   (
             t.lastupdated >= to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD')   
         or pt.lastupdated >= to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD')  
         or fi.lastupdated >= to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD')  
        )  
*/
where   to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD') <= any(t.lastupdated, pt.lastupdated, fi.lastupdated)   
and     pt.id = t.id  
and     fi.id = t.id  
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline'));

You’ll see that I have a simple three-table join with the nasty little detail that I have a “non-join” predicates that may require Oracle to check across all three tables before it can decide whether or not a row should be discarded. I’ve shown two variants on a theme – they both have exactly the same effect but the ANY() presentation is just a little bit neater and more compact.

Essentially Oracle can use one of two strategies for this type of query/predicate; the first is to join all three tables and wait until the final join rowsource appears and then apply the check, or it can split the query into a union all of three separate queries where each query drives off a different table selecting only the rows from that table that match “its” part of the predicate.

In the latter case the second and third branches of the union all have to be modified to ensure that they discard any rows already returned by preceding parts of the union all; this can mean lots of new predicates appearing that use the lnnvl() function. (Of course there are variants between these two extremes, but the general principle is unchanged.)

The presence of the (incomplete) /*+ or_expand */ hint in my query is there to tell the optimizer that it should attempt to transform the query into the three-part union all. This, by the way, is a 12c feature, though older versions of Oracle could get similar effects in some cases from the /*+ use_concat */ hint. Here’s the plan, with outline,  I got from 12.2.0.1:

Plan hash value: 3181357500

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name               | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |                    |     3 |   270 |    17   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  VIEW                   | VW_ORE_67EF6547    |     3 |   270 |    17   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL             |                    |       |       |            |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN            |                    |     1 |    55 |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN|                    |     4 |   144 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T_FURTHER_INFO     |     1 |    13 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |      BUFFER SORT        |                    |     3 |    69 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  7 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL | T_OTHERS           |     3 |    69 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T                  |     3 |    57 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  9 |    HASH JOIN            |                    |     2 |   182 |    11  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|  10 |     VIEW                | VW_JF_SET$FB5125FC |     2 |   156 |     9  (12)| 00:00:01 |
|  11 |      UNION-ALL          |                    |       |       |            |          |
|* 12 |       HASH JOIN         |                    |     1 |    42 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 13 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T_OTHERS           |     1 |    23 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 14 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T                  |     3 |    57 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 15 |       HASH JOIN         |                    |     1 |    42 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 16 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T                  |     1 |    19 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  17 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T_OTHERS           |     4 |    92 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  18 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T_FURTHER_INFO     |     4 |    52 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------

  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$7C4216F7" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$7C4216F7" "T"@"SEL$1" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$7C4216F7" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$7C4216F7" "T"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$A4A33BE0" "T"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$A4A33BE0" "PT"@"SEL$1" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$A4A33BE0" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$A4A33BE0" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "T"@"SEL$1")
      USE_MERGE_CARTESIAN(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "FI"@"SEL$1" "PT"@"SEL$1" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "FI"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$5FCD2D3C" "FI"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$5FCD2D3C" "VW_JF_SET$FB5125FC"@"SEL$81DF0931" "FI"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$5FCD2D3C" "FI"@"SEL$1")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$5FCD2D3C" "VW_JF_SET$FB5125FC"@"SEL$81DF0931")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$67EF6547" "VW_ORE_67EF6547"@"SEL$67EF6547")
      OUTLINE(@"SET$49E1C21B_2")
      OUTLINE(@"SET$49E1C21B_1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      FACTORIZE_JOIN(@"SET$49E1C21B"("FI"@"SET$49E1C21B_2" "FI"@"SET$49E1C21B_1"))
      OUTLINE(@"SET$0E101D56")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$81DF0931")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$5AB42CD1")
      OR_EXPAND(@"SEL$1" (1) (2) (3))
      OUTLINE(@"SET$49E1C21B")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$67EF6547")
      FACTORIZE_JOIN(@"SET$49E1C21B"("FI"@"SET$49E1C21B_2" "FI"@"SET$49E1C21B_1"))
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$0E101D56")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$5FCD2D3C")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$FB5125FC")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$A4A33BE0")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$7C4216F7")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$49E1C21B_3")
      ALL_ROWS
      DB_VERSION('12.2.0.1')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('12.2.0.1')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID" AND "FI"."ID"="T"."ID")
   5 - filter("FI"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
   7 - filter(LNNVL("PT"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss')))
   8 - filter(LNNVL("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss')))
   9 - access("FI"."ID"="ITEM_1")
  12 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID")
  13 - filter("PT"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
  14 - filter(LNNVL("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss')))
  15 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID")
  16 - filter("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))

This is a wonderful demonstration of how brilliant the optimizer can be.  The query has gone through several transformations and two of them have very high visibility. First, you can see the name VW_ORE_67EF6547 at operation 1. This is a view name that Oracle generates to express (cost-based) “OR-Expansion” so the optimizer has clearly obeyed my hint. As a consequence of OR-expansion we can also see several examples of the lnnvl() function appearing in the Predicate Information section of the output.; we can also see the hint re-appearing in the completed form of OR_EXPAND(@”SEL$1″ (1) (2) (3)) in the Outline Data.

However, we don’t have the union all of three pieces that we might have expected; we have a union all of two pieces and the second piece is a hash join between the table t_further_info and a view called VW_JF_SET$FB5125FC. This view is the result of “join factorization”. The optimizer has taken the 2nd and 3rd sections of our union all view and decided that it would be cost-effective to “factor out” a common table, so this:

select from t_others, t, t_further_info ... where t_others.date_predicate ...
union all
select from t, t_others, t_further_info ... where t.date_predicate ...

changes to this:

select from 
        (
        select from t_others, t   ... where t_others.date_predicate ...
        union all
        select from t, t_others   ... where t.date_predicate ...
        ),
        t_further_info 
where   ...

Having said all that, I now have to change the code because the original query was written using “ANSI” style joins – like this:

explain plan for
select
        /*+ or_expand */
        * 
from
        t   
inner join 
        t_others       pt  
on      pt.id = t.id  
inner join 
        t_further_info fi  
on      fi.id = t.id  
where
        (
             t.lastupdated >= to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD')   
         or pt.lastupdated >= to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD')  
         or fi.lastupdated >= to_date('2019-10-21', 'YYYY-MM-DD')  
        )
;

select  * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline'));

In the ANSI example I happen to have used the explicit “OR” list for the date predicates but that’s not really signficant . Here’s the plan produced by this query – and the first thing I’d like you to note is the Plan hash value:

Plan hash value: 3309788271

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name               | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |                    |     3 |   270 |    17   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  VIEW                   | VW_ORE_31069B60    |     3 |   270 |    17   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL             |                    |       |       |            |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN            |                    |     1 |    55 |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN|                    |     4 |   144 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T_FURTHER_INFO     |     1 |    13 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |      BUFFER SORT        |                    |     3 |    69 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  7 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL | T_OTHERS           |     3 |    69 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T                  |     3 |    57 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  9 |    HASH JOIN            |                    |     2 |   182 |    11  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|  10 |     VIEW                | VW_JF_SET$997549B1 |     2 |   156 |     9  (12)| 00:00:01 |
|  11 |      UNION-ALL          |                    |       |       |            |          |
|* 12 |       HASH JOIN         |                    |     1 |    42 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 13 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T_OTHERS           |     1 |    23 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 14 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T                  |     3 |    57 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 15 |       HASH JOIN         |                    |     1 |    42 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 16 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T                  |     1 |    19 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  17 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T_OTHERS           |     4 |    92 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  18 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T_FURTHER_INFO     |     4 |    52 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------

  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$D12FC97A" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$D12FC97A" "T"@"SEL$1" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$D12FC97A" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$D12FC97A" "T"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$09C9729D" "T"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$09C9729D" "PT"@"SEL$1" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$09C9729D" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$09C9729D" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      USE_HASH(@"SET$E8D85587_3" "T"@"SEL$1")
      USE_MERGE_CARTESIAN(@"SET$E8D85587_3" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SET$E8D85587_3" "FI"@"SEL$2" "PT"@"SEL$1" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SET$E8D85587_3" "T"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SET$E8D85587_3" "PT"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SET$E8D85587_3" "FI"@"SEL$2")
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$95B99BAF" "FI"@"SEL$2")
      LEADING(@"SEL$95B99BAF" "VW_JF_SET$997549B1"@"SEL$BB7F1ECF" "FI"@"SEL$2")
      FULL(@"SEL$95B99BAF" "FI"@"SEL$2")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$95B99BAF" "VW_JF_SET$997549B1"@"SEL$BB7F1ECF")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$31069B60" "VW_ORE_31069B60"@"SEL$31069B60")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
      MERGE(@"SEL$1" >"SEL$2")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$58A6D7F6")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$3")
      OUTLINE(@"SET$E8D85587_2")
      OUTLINE(@"SET$E8D85587_1")
      MERGE(@"SEL$58A6D7F6" >"SEL$3")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$9E43CB6E")
      FACTORIZE_JOIN(@"SET$E8D85587"("FI"@"SET$E8D85587_2" "FI"@"SET$E8D85587_1"))
      OUTLINE(@"SET$6117B24C")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$BB7F1ECF")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$344003E3")
      OR_EXPAND(@"SEL$9E43CB6E" (1) (2) (3))
      OUTLINE(@"SET$E8D85587")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$31069B60")
      FACTORIZE_JOIN(@"SET$E8D85587"("FI"@"SET$E8D85587_2" "FI"@"SET$E8D85587_1"))
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$6117B24C")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$95B99BAF")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$997549B1")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$09C9729D")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$D12FC97A")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$E8D85587_3")
      ALL_ROWS
      DB_VERSION('12.2.0.1')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('12.2.0.1')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("FI"."ID"="T"."ID" AND "PT"."ID"="T"."ID")
   5 - filter("FI"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
   7 - filter(LNNVL("PT"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss')))
   8 - filter(LNNVL("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss')))
   9 - access("FI"."ID"="ITEM_1")
  12 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID")
  13 - filter("PT"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
  14 - filter(LNNVL("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss')))
  15 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID")
  16 - filter("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))

Is the plan for the “ANSI” version of the query the same as the plan for the “traditional” version? How carefully have you checked – after simply noting that the two Plan hash values were different.

The plans are the same – in that the mechanics are exactly the same and that ought to be the criterion on which we should judge them. But the hash values are different because of the change from traditional to ANSI syntax. The traditional form of the query starts life with a single query block while the ANSI form is considered to be two query blocks, so the initial ANSI query goes through three stages:

1) select from t1 join t2 join t3

2) select /*+ qb_name(sel$2) */ from (select /* qb_name(sel$1) */ from t1, t2), t3

3) select /*+ qb_name(sel$9E43CB6E) */ from t1, t2, t3

So the query is rapidly transformed to the equivalent traditional syntax but we  now have a query block name of SEL$9E43CB6E instead of SEL$1 that the traditional query (in the absence of a /*+ qb_name() */ hint would have had. This is why you see the difference in the two or_expand() hints in the Outline Data section. One reads: OR_EXPAND(@SEL$1 (1) (2) (3)), the other reads OR_EXPAND(@”SEL$9E43CB6E” (1) (2) (3)), and all the subseqent query block name differences follow on from this initial transformation. (Note: the value “sel$9e43cb6e” is derived from the input query block names of sel$1 and sel$2 that the new query block is derived from)

You may decide that this mismatch isn’t really terribly important. If you’ve modified the code to switch to ANSI style joins then you may be prepared to put in a little extra effort to check the plan in detail to see that it hasn’t changed; but it would be a lot nicer if the hash value wasn’t dependent on generated view names. You may recall that at one time Oracle had problems with plans that used materialized CTEs (“with” subqueries) because the plan hash value was affected by object names like sys_temp_0fd9d6791_dfc12da. The same principle ought, I think, to apply here.

If you don’t mind the ANSI/tradiational switch though, you might find that you’re less happy when you upgrade to 19c, because the same effect appears there too, only it’s worse. Not only do “identical” traditional and ANSI plans have different hash values, they don’t match the values from 12c because the generated name for the join factorization views (VW_JF) change in the upgrade. So if you’re depending on SQL Plan Baselines to reproduce 12c plans on 19c when you upgrade you may find cases where you know the stored baseline is giving you the same plan but Oracle thinks it isn’t and refuses to use it.

tl;dr

Plans which are functionally identical can have different plan hash values because the plans were reached through a different series of tranformations. In particular if you rewrite queries from “traditional” Oracle syntax to “ANSI” syntax you will find cases where the plan doesn’t change but the plan hash value does thanks to a change in the names of views generated by some transformations.

More significantly, if you upgrade from 12c to 19c there are case where the names of views generated by transformations may change, which could cause the optimizer to discard some of your carefully constructed SQL Plan Baselines as “not reproducible”.

Footnote

For reference, if I add the hint /*+ opt_param(‘_optimizer_join_factorization’ ‘false’) */ to the “traditional query then I get the following plan which shows more clearly the three branches that the original query has been split into – each section starting with a different choice for the driving table:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name            | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |                 |     3 |   270 |    19   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  VIEW                   | VW_ORE_67EF6547 |     3 |   270 |    19   (6)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL             |                 |       |       |            |          |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN            |                 |     1 |    55 |     7  (15)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     HASH JOIN           |                 |     1 |    32 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T               |     1 |    19 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T_FURTHER_INFO  |     4 |    52 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T_OTHERS        |     4 |    92 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |    HASH JOIN            |                 |     1 |    55 |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   9 |     MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN|                 |     4 |   144 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 10 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T_OTHERS        |     1 |    23 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  11 |      BUFFER SORT        |                 |     4 |    52 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  12 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL | T_FURTHER_INFO  |     4 |    52 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 13 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T               |     3 |    57 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 14 |    HASH JOIN            |                 |     1 |    55 |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  15 |     MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN|                 |     4 |   144 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 16 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T_FURTHER_INFO  |     1 |    13 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|  17 |      BUFFER SORT        |                 |     3 |    69 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 18 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL | T_OTHERS        |     3 |    69 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 19 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL   | T               |     3 |    57 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------

  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      USE_HASH(@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      USE_MERGE_CARTESIAN(@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      LEADING(@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_3"
              "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_3" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      USE_HASH(@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      USE_MERGE_CARTESIAN(@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      LEADING(@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_2"
              "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_2" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      USE_HASH(@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      USE_HASH(@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      LEADING(@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_1"
              "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "PT"@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "FI"@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      FULL(@"SET$BB614FD2_1" "T"@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$49E1C21B" "VW_ORE_67EF6547"@"SEL$67EF6547")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OR_EXPAND(@"SEL$1" (1) (2) (3))
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$49E1C21B")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$BB614FD2")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$BB614FD2_1")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$BB614FD2_2")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$BB614FD2_3")
      ALL_ROWS
      OPT_PARAM('_optimizer_join_factorization' 'false')
      DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID")
   4 - access("FI"."ID"="T"."ID")
   5 - filter("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
   8 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID" AND "FI"."ID"="T"."ID")
  10 - filter("PT"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
  13 - filter(LNNVL("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00',
              'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss')))
  14 - access("PT"."ID"="T"."ID" AND "FI"."ID"="T"."ID")
  16 - filter("FI"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd
              hh24:mi:ss'))
  18 - filter(LNNVL("PT"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00',
              'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss')))
  19 - filter(LNNVL("T"."LASTUPDATED">=TO_DATE(' 2019-10-21 00:00:00',
              'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss')))

88 rows selected.

Although the “traditional” and “ANSI” plans still show a difference in their Plan hash values when join factorization is blocked, the absence of the join factorization view means that the plan hash values are now consistent between 12c to 19c (the output above came from 19.3.0.0 as you can see in the Outline information).

opt_estimate catalogue

This is just a list of the notes I’ve written about the opt_estimate() hint.

• opt_estimate – using the hint to affect index calculations: index_scan and index_filter
• opt_estimate 2 – applying the hint to nested loop joins, options: nlj_index_scan and nlj_index_filter
• opt_estimate 3 – a couple of little-known options for the hint, “group_by” and “having”.
• opt_estimate 4 – applying the hint at the query block level: particularly useful for CTEs (“with subquery”) and non-mergeable views.
• opt_estimate 5 – a story of failure: trying to use opt_estimate to push predicates into a union all view.

I have a couple more drafts on the topic awaiting completion, but if you know of any other articles that would be a good addition to the list feel free to reference them in the comments.

 

opt_estimate 5

If you’ve been wondering why I resurrected my drafts on the opt_estimate() hint, a few weeks ago I received an email containing an example of a query where a couple of opt_estimate() hints were simply not working. The critical features of the example was that the basic structure of the query was of a type that I had not previously examined. That’s actually a common type of problem when trying to investigate any Oracle feature from cold – you can spend days thinking about all the possible scenarios you should model then the first time you need to do apply your knowledge to a production system the requirement falls outside every model you’ve examined.

Before you go any further reading this note, though, I should warn you that it ends in frustration because I didn’t find a solution to the problem I wanted to fix – possibly because there just isn’t a solution, possibly because I didn’t look hard enough.

So here’s a simplified version of the problem – it involves pushing a predicate into a union all view. First some data and a baseline query:

rem
rem     Script:         opt_estimate_3a.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          June 2019
rem

create table t1
as
select
        rownum                          id,
        100 * trunc(rownum/100)-1       id2,
        mod(rownum,1e3)                 n1,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')             v1,
        lpad('x',100,'x')               padding
from
        dual
connect by
        rownum <= 1e4   -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

create table t2a pctfree 75 as select * from t1;
create table t2b pctfree 75 as select * from t1;

create index t2ai on t2a(id);
create index t2bi on t2b(id);

explain plan for
select
        t1.v1,
        t2.flag,
        t2.v1
from
        t1,
        (select 'a' flag, t2a.* from t2a
         union all
         select 'b', t2b.* from t2b
        )       t2
where
        t2.id = t1.n1
and     t1.id = 99
/

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline alias'))
/

There is one row with t1.id = 99, and I would like the optimizer to use an indexed access path to select the one matching row from each of the two tables in the union all view. The smart execution plan would be a nested loop using a “pushed join predicate” – and that’s exactly what we get by default with this data set:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                              | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                       |      |     2 |    96 |    30   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                          |      |     2 |    96 |    30   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL                    | T1   |     1 |    19 |    26   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |   VIEW                                 |      |     1 |    29 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    UNION ALL PUSHED PREDICATE          |      |       |       |            |          |
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2A  |     1 |    15 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  6 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2AI |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2B  |     1 |    15 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2BI |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------
   1 - SEL$1
   2 - SEL$1        / T1@SEL$1
   3 - SET$5715CE2E / T2@SEL$1
   4 - SET$5715CE2E
   5 - SEL$639F1A6F / T2A@SEL$2
   6 - SEL$639F1A6F / T2A@SEL$2
   7 - SEL$B01C6807 / T2B@SEL$3
   8 - SEL$B01C6807 / T2B@SEL$3

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SEL$639F1A6F" "T2A"@"SEL$2")
      INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SEL$639F1A6F" "T2A"@"SEL$2" ("T2A"."ID"))
      BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SEL$B01C6807" "T2B"@"SEL$3")
      INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SEL$B01C6807" "T2B"@"SEL$3" ("T2B"."ID"))
      USE_NL(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SET$1")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$3")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$1")
      PUSH_PRED(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1" 1)
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$5715CE2E")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$B01C6807")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$639F1A6F")
      ALL_ROWS
      OPT_PARAM('_nlj_batching_enabled' 0)
      DB_VERSION('12.2.0.1')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('12.2.0.1')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("T1"."ID"=99)
   6 - access("T2A"."ID"="T1"."N1")
   8 - access("T2B"."ID"="T1"."N1")

So that worked well – operation 2 predicts one row for the tablescan of t1, with a nested loop join and union all pushed predicate where an index range scan of t2a_i1 and t2b_i1 gives us one row from each table. The “Predicate Information” tells us that the t1.n1 join predicate has been pushed inside the view to both subqueries so we see “t2a.id = t1.n1”, and “t2b.id = t1.n1”.

So what if I want to tell Oracle that it will actually find 5 rows in the t2a range scan and table access and 7 rows in the t2b range scan and table access (perhaps in a more complex view that would persuade Oracle to use two different indexes to get into the view and change the join order and access method for the next few tables it accessed). Since I’ve recently just written about the nlj_index_scan option for opt_estimate() you might think that this is the one we need to use – perhaps something like:

opt_estimate(@sel$639f1a6f nlj_index_scan, t2a@sel$2 (t1), t2a_i1, scale_rows=5)
opt_estimate(@sel$b01c6807 nlj_index_scan, t2b@sel$3 (t1), t2b_i1, scale_rows=7)

You’ll notice I’ve been very careful to find the fully qualified aliases for t2a and t2b by looking at the “Query Block Name / Object Alias” section of the plan (if the view appeared as a result of Oracle using Concatenation or OR-Expansion you would find that you got two query block names that looked similar but had suffixes of “_1” and “_2”). But it wasn’t worth the effort, it didn’t work. Fiddling around with all the possible variations I could think of didn’t help (maybe I should have used set$5715ce2e as the query block target for both the hints – no; what if I …)

Of course if we look at the “Outline Data” we’d notice that the use_nl() hint in the outline says: “USE_NL(@SEL$1 T2@SEL$1)”, so we don’t have a nested loop into t2a and t2b, we have a nested loop into the  view t2. So I decided to forget the nested loop idea and just go for the indexes (and the tables, when I got to them) with the following hints (you’ll notice that during the course of my experiments I added my own query block names to the initial query blocks – so the generated query block names have changed):

explain plan for
select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                opt_estimate(@sel$f2bf1101, index_scan, t2a@subq_a, t2ai, scale_rows=5)
                opt_estimate(@sel$f2bf1101, table,      t2a@subq_a,       scale_rows=5)
                opt_estimate(@sel$f4e7a233, index_scan, t2b@subq_b, t2bi, scale_rows=7)
                opt_estimate(@sel$f4e7a233, table,      t2b@subq_b,       scale_rows=7)
        */
        t1.v1,
        t2.flag,
        t2.v1
from
        t1,
        (select /*+ qb_name(subq_a) */ 'a' flag, t2a.* from t2a
         union all
         select /*+ qb_name(subq_b) */ 'b', t2b.* from t2b
        )       t2
where
        t2.id = t1.n1
and     t1.id = 99
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'outline alias'));


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                              | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                       |      |     2 |    96 |    30   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                          |      |     2 |    96 |    30   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL                    | T1   |     1 |    19 |    26   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |   VIEW                                 |      |     1 |    29 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |    UNION ALL PUSHED PREDICATE          |      |       |       |            |          |
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2A  |     5 |    75 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  6 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2AI |     5 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2B  |     7 |   105 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  8 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2BI |     7 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Excellent – we get the cardinalities we want to see for the tables – except the view operator doesn’t hold the sum of the table cardinalities, and the join doesn’t multiply up the estimates either. I couldn’t find a way of getting the view to show 12 rows (not even with a guessed – but presumably unimplemented – opt_estimate(view …) hint!), however during the course of my experiments I tried the hint: “opt_estimate(@main, table, t2@main, scale_rows=15)”. This didn’t have any visible effect in the plan but while searching through the 10053 trace file I found the following lines:

Table Stats::
  Table: from$_subquery$_002  Alias: T2  (NOT ANALYZED)
  #Rows: 20000  SSZ: 0  LGR: 0  #Blks:  37  AvgRowLen:  15.00  NEB: 0  ChainCnt:  0.00  ScanRate:  0.00  SPC: 0  RFL: 0  RNF: 0  CBK: 0  CHR: 0  KQDFLG: 9

Access path analysis for from$_subquery$_002
    >> Single Tab Card adjusted from 20000.000000 to 300000.000000 due to opt_estimate hint

Access path analysis for from$_subquery$_002
    >> Single Tab Card adjusted from 12.000000 to 180.000000 due to opt_estimate hint

So at some point in the code path the optimizer is aware that 5 + 7 = 12, and that 12 * 15 = 180. But this doesn’t show up in the final execution plan. You might notice, by the way, that the scale_rows=15 has been applied NOT ONLY to the place where I was aiming – it’s also been applied to scale up the 20,000 rows that are estimated to be in the union all to 300,000 as the estimate for a tablescan of the two tables.

Possibly if I spent more time working through the 10053 trace file (which, as I’ve said before, I try to avoid doing) I might have found exactly which code path Oracle followed to get to the plan it produced and managed to tweak some hints to get the numbers I wanted to see. Possibly the optimizer was already following the code path that actually produced the numbers I wanted, then “forgot” to use them. One day, perhaps, I’ll tale another look at the problem – but since I wasn’t trying to solve a problem for a client (and given that there was an alternative workaround) I closed the 10053 trace file and put the model aside for a rainy day.

Footnote

One thought did cross my mind as a way of finding out if there was a real solution – and I offer this for anyone who wants to play: create a second data set that genuinely produces the 5 and 7 I want to see (and, check that the view reports the sum of the two components); then run the original query against the original data so that you’ve got the execution plan in memory, overwrite the original data with the new data set (without changing the statistics on the orginal). Then use the SQL Tuning Advisor to see if it produces a SQL profile for the captured SQL_ID that reproduces the correct plan for the second data set and check what opt_estimate() hints it uses.  (Warning – this may turn into a frustrating waste of time.)

Update Oct 2019

I’ve been saying for years that I don’t like the trick of pulling the Outline Information from an execution plan in memory and storing it in the database as an SQL Profile because that’s effectively storing an SQL Plan Baseline as an SQL Profile and there might be subtle and (potentially) misleading side effects of abusing the two mechanisms. Behind the argument I’ve also made the observation that while both mechamisms store hints, the hints for an SQL Profile are about statistics and the hints for an SQL Plan Baseline are about transformations, joins, and other mechanis.

However .;.

I’ve now down the test I described in the foot note above – created a table with data in it that made Oracle choose full tablescans for the t2a and t2b tables, then changed the data (without changing the object statistic) and run the SQL Tuning tool to see if the optimizer would suggest the plan I wanted and offer a profile to produce it.

I was successful – Oracle offered the profile, and when I looked at it (before accepting it) it looked like this:

         1 OPT_ESTIMATE(@"SEL$1", TABLE, "T2"@"SEL$1", SCALE_ROWS=200)
         1 OPT_ESTIMATE(@"SEL$1", JOIN, ("T2"@"SEL$1", "T1"@"SEL$1"), SCALE_ROWS=15)
         1 OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE(default)
         1 IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS

But when I accepted it and looked at it again it looked like this:

        BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SEL$639F1A6F" "T2A"@"SEL$2")
        IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
        BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SEL$B01C6807" "T2B"@"SEL$3")
        INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SEL$B01C6807" "T2B"@"SEL$3" ("T2B"."ID"))
        USE_NL(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
        LEADING(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
        NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
        FULL(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1")
        OUTLINE(@"SET$1")
        OUTLINE(@"SEL$3")
        OUTLINE(@"SEL$2")
        OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$1")
        PUSH_PRED(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1" 1)
        OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$5715CE2E")
        OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$B01C6807")
        OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$639F1A6F")
        ALL_ROWS
        DB_VERSION('19.1.0')
        OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('19.1.0')
        INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SEL$639F1A6F" "T2A"@"SEL$2" ("T2A"."ID"))

In other words, Oracle has recorded something that looks like an SQL Plan Baseline and called it an SQL Profile.

opt_estimate 4

In the previous article in this series on the opt_estimate() hint I mentioned the “query_block” option for the hint. If you can identify a specify query block that becomes an “outline_leaf” in an execution plan (perhaps because you’ve deliberately given an query block name to an inline subquery and applied the no_merge() hint to it) then you can use the opt_estimate() hint to tell the optimizer how many rows will be produced by that query block (each time it starts). The syntax of the hint is very simple:

opt_estimate(@{query block name}  query_block  rows={number of rows})

As with other options for the hint, you can use scale_rows=, min=, max= as alternatives (the last seems to be used in the code generated by Oracle for materialized view refreshes) but the simple “rows=N” is likely to be the most popular. In effect it does the same as the “non-specific” version of the cardinality() hint – which I’ve suggested from time to time as a way of telling the optimizer the size of a data set in a materialized CTE (“with” subquery), e.g.

set serveroutput off

with demo as (
        select  /*+
                        qb_name(mat_cte)
                        materialize
                        cardinality(@mat_cte 11)
--                      opt_estimate(@mat_cte query_block rows=11)
                */
                distinct trunc(created)    date_list
        from    all_objects
)
select  * from demo
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);
    

Regardless of whether you use the opt_estimate() or cardinality() hint above, the materialized temporary table will be reported with 11 rows. (Note that in this case where the hint is inside the query block it applies to the “@mat_cte” isn’t necessary).

In the previous article I generated some data with a script called opt_est_gby.sql to show you the effects of the group_by and having options of the opt_estimate() hint and pointed out that there were case where you might also want to include the query_block option as well. Here’s a final example query showing the effect, with the scale_rows feature after creating a table t2 as a copy of t1 but setting pctfree 75 (to make a tablescan more expensive) and creating an index on t2(id):

create table t2 pctfree 75 as select * from t1;
create index t2_i1 on t2(id);

select
        t2.n1, t1ct
from
        t2,
        (
        select  /*+
                        qb_name(main)
                        opt_estimate(@main group_by scale_rows=4)
                        opt_estimate(@main having scale_rows=0.4)
                        opt_estimate(@main query_block scale_rows=0.5)
                */
                mod(n1,10), count(*) t1ct
        from    t1
        group by
                mod(n1,10)
        having
                count(*) > 100
        ) v1
where
        t2.id = v1.t1ct
;

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                    | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |       |     8 |   168 |    27   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                |       |     8 |   168 |    27   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS               |       |     8 |   168 |    27   (8)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    VIEW                      |       |     8 |   104 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     FILTER                   |       |       |       |            |          |
|   5 |      HASH GROUP BY           |       |     8 |    32 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL      | T1    |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  7 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | T2_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   8 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T2    |     1 |     8 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter(COUNT(*)>100)
   7 - access("T2"."ID"="V1"."T1CT")

I’ve inlined the last query (with the two opt_estimate() hints) that I used in the previous article, and added a third opt_estimate() hint to that inline view. In this case I didn’t have to add a no_merge() hint because the numbers worked in my favour but to be safe in a production environment that’s a hint that I should have included.

You may recall that the hash group by on its own resulted in a prediction of 200 rows, and with the having clause the prediction dropped to 10 rows (standard 5%). With my three opt_estimate() hints in place I should see the effects of the following arithmetic:

group by      200       * 4   = 800
having        5% of 800 * 0.4 =  16
query block   16        * 0.5 =   8

As you can see, the cardinality prediction for the VIEW operation is, indeed, 8 – so the combination of hints has worked. It’s just a shame that we can’t see the three individual steps in the arithmetic as we walk the plan.

A Warning

As always I can only repeat – hinting is not easy; and “not easy” usually translates to “not stable / not safe” (and thanks to a Freudian slip while typing: “not sage”. You probably don’t know how do it properly, except in the very simplest cases, and we don’t really know how Oracle is interpreting the hints (particularly the undocumented ones). Here’s an example of how puzzling even the opt_estimate(query_block) hint can be – as usual starting with some data:

rem
rem     Script:         opt_estimate_2.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Aug 2017
rem

create table t1
as
select * from all_objects;

create table t2
as
select * from all_objects;

As you can see, I’ve been a bit lazy with this example (which I wrote a couple of years ago) and it uses all_objects as a convenient source of data. Unfortunately this means you won’t necessarily be able to reproduce exactly the results I’m about to show you, which I did on a small instance of 12.2.0.1. I’m going to examine four versions of a simple query which

• restricts the rows from t1,
• finds the unique set of object_types in that subset of t1
• then joins to t2 by object_type

select
        /*+ 
                qb_name(main)
        */
        t2.object_id, t2.object_name, created
from    (
        select  /*+ qb_name(inline) */
                distinct object_type
        from    t1 
        where 
                created >= date'2017-03-01' 
        )       v1,
        t2
where
        t2.object_type = v1.object_type
;


select
        /*+ 
                qb_name(main)
                merge(@inline)
        */
        t2.object_id, t2.object_name, created
from    (
        select  /*+ qb_name(inline) */
                distinct object_type
        from    t1 
        where 
                created >= date'2017-03-01' 
        )       v1,
        t2
where
        t2.object_type = v1.object_type
;


select
        /*+ 
                qb_name(main)
                opt_estimate(@inline query_block rows=14)
        */
        t2.object_id, t2.object_name, created
from    (
        select  /*+ qb_name(inline) */
                distinct object_type
        from    t1 
        where 
                created >= date'2017-03-01' 
        )       v1,
        t2
where
        t2.object_type = v1.object_type
;


select
        /*+ 
                qb_name(main)
                merge(@inline)
                opt_estimate(@inline query_block rows=14)
        */
        t2.object_id, t2.object_name, created
from    (
        select  /*+ qb_name(inline) */
                distinct object_type
        from    t1 
        where 
                created >= date'2017-03-01' 
        )       v1,
        t2
where
        t2.object_type = v1.object_type
;

The first version is my unhinted baseline (where, in my case, Oracle doesn’t use complex view merging), the second forces complex view merging of the inline aggregate view, then queries 3 and 4 repeat queries 1 and 2 but tell the optimizer that the number of distinct object_type values  is 14 (roughly half the actual in may case). But there is an oddity in the last query – I’ve told the optimizer how many rows it should estimate for the inline view but I’ve also told it to get rid of the inline view and merge it into the outer query block; so what effect is that going to have? My hope would be that the hint would have to be ignored because it’s going to apply to a query block that doesn’t exist in the final plan and that makes it irrelevant and unusable. Here are the four execution plans:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      | 61776 |  4464K|   338   (7)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN           |      | 61776 |  4464K|   338   (7)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   VIEW               |      |    27 |   351 |   173   (9)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    HASH UNIQUE       |      |    27 |   486 |   173   (9)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   | 59458 |  1045K|   164   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T2   | 61776 |  3680K|   163   (4)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T2"."OBJECT_TYPE"="V1"."OBJECT_TYPE")
   4 - filter("CREATED">=TO_DATE(' 2017-03-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation              | Name      | Rows  | Bytes |TempSpc| Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT       |           | 61776 |  5308K|       |  1492   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  VIEW                  | VM_NWVW_1 | 61776 |  5308K|       |  1492   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   HASH UNIQUE          |           | 61776 |  5489K|  6112K|  1492   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN RIGHT SEMI|           | 61776 |  5489K|       |   330   (5)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T1        | 59458 |  1045K|       |   164   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T2        | 61776 |  4403K|       |   163   (4)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T2"."OBJECT_TYPE"="OBJECT_TYPE")
   4 - filter("CREATED">=TO_DATE(' 2017-03-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |      | 32032 |  2314K|   338   (7)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN           |      | 32032 |  2314K|   338   (7)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   VIEW               |      |    14 |   182 |   173   (9)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    HASH UNIQUE       |      |    14 |   252 |   173   (9)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   | 59458 |  1045K|   164   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T2   | 61776 |  3680K|   163   (4)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T2"."OBJECT_TYPE"="V1"."OBJECT_TYPE")
   4 - filter("CREATED">=TO_DATE(' 2017-03-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation              | Name      | Rows  | Bytes |TempSpc| Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT       |           |    14 |  1232 |       |  1492   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  VIEW                  | VM_NWVW_1 |    14 |  1232 |       |  1492   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   HASH UNIQUE          |           |    14 |  1274 |  6112K|  1492   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN RIGHT SEMI|           | 61776 |  5489K|       |   330   (5)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T1        | 59458 |  1045K|       |   164   (4)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T2        | 61776 |  4403K|       |   163   (4)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T2"."OBJECT_TYPE"="OBJECT_TYPE")
   4 - filter("CREATED">=TO_DATE(' 2017-03-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'))

The first plan tells us that most of the rows in t1 have created > 1st March 2017 and there are (estimated) 27 distinct values for object_type; and there are 61,776 rows in t2 (which is basically the same as t1), and none of them are eliminated by the join on object_type from the inline view.

The second plan (with the forced complext view merging) shows Oracle changing the view with “distinct” into a (right) semi-join between t2 and t1 with the internal view name of VM_NWVW_1 – and the cardinality is correct.

The third plan shows that my hint telling the optimizer to assume the original inline view produces 14 rows has been accepted and, not surprisingly, when we claim that we have roughly half the number of object_type values the final estimate of rows in the join is roughly halved.

So what happens in the fourth plan when our hint applies to a view that no longer exists? I think the optimizer should have discarded the hint as irrelevant the moment it merged the view. Unfortunately it seems to have carried the hint up into the merged view and used it to produce a wildly inaccurate estimate for the final cardinality. If this had been a three-table join this is the sort of error that could make a sensible hash join into a third table become an unbelievably stupid nested loop join. If you had thought you were doing something incredibly clever with (just) the one opt_estimate() hint, the day might come when a small change in the statistics resulted in the optimizer using a view merge strategy you’d never seen before and producing a catastrophic execution plan in (say) an overnight batch that then ran “forever”.

Hinting is hard, you really have to be extremely thorough in your hints and make sure you cover all the options that might appear. And then you might still run into something that looks (as this does) like a bug.

Footnote

Here’s a closing thought: even if you manage to tell the optimizer exactly how many rows will come out of a query block to be joined to the next table in the query, you may still get a very bad plan unless you can also tell the optimizer how many distinct values of the join column(s) there are in that data set. Which means you may also have to learn all about the (even more undocumented) column_stats() hint.

 

opt_estimate 3

This is just a quick note to throw out a couple of of the lesser-known options for the opt_estimate() hint – and they may be variants that are likely to be most useful since they address a problem where the optimizer can produce consistently bad cardinality estimates. The first is the “group by” option – a hint that I once would have called a “strategic” hint but which more properly ought to be called a “query block” hint. Here’s the simplest possible example (tested under 12.2, 18.3 and 19.2):

rem
rem     Script:         opt_est_gby.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          June 2019
rem 

create table t1
as
select
        rownum                  id,
        mod(rownum,200)         n1,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')     v1,
        rpad('x',100)           padding
)
from
        dual
connect by
        level <= 3000
;

set autotrace on explain

prompt  =============================
prompt  Baseline cardinality estimate
prompt  (correct cardinality is 10)
prompt  Estimate will be 200
prompt  =============================

select  /*+
                qb_name(main)
        */
        mod(n1,10), count(*) 
from    t2 
group by 
        mod(n1,10)
;

I’ve generated a table of 3,000 rows with a column n1 holding 15 rows each of 200 distinct values. The query then aggregates on mod(n1,10) so it has to return 10 rows, but the optimizer doesn’t have a mechanism for inferring this and produces the following plan – the Rows value from the HASH GROUP BY at operation 1 is the only thing we’re really interested in here:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |   200 |   800 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  HASH GROUP BY     |      |   200 |   800 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

It looks as if the optimizer’s default position is to use num_distinct from the underlying column as the estimate for the aggregate. We can work around this in the usual two ways with an opt_estimate() hint. First, let’s tell the optimizer that it’s going to over-estimate the cardinality by a factor of 10:

select  /*+
                qb_name(main)
                opt_estimate(@main group_by, scale_rows = 0.1)
        */
        mod(n1,10), count(*) 
from    t1 
group by 
        mod(n1,10)
;

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |    20 |    80 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  HASH GROUP BY     |      |    20 |    80 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The hint uses group_by as the critical option parameter, and then I’ve used the standard scale_rows=nnn to set a scaling factor that should be used to adjust the result of the default calculation. At 10% (0.1) this gives us an estimate of 20 rows.

Alternatively, we could simply tell the optimizer how many rows we want it to believe will be generated for the aggregate – let’s just tell it that the result will be 10 rows.

select  /*+
                qb_name(main)
                opt_estimate(@main group_by, rows = 10)
        */
        mod(n1,10), count(*) 
from    t1 
group by 
        mod(n1,10)
;

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |    10 |    40 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  HASH GROUP BY     |      |    10 |    40 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

We use the same group_by as the critical parameter, with rows=nnn.

Next steps

After an aggregation there’s often a “having” clause so you might consider using the group_by option to fix up the cardinality of the having clause if you know what the normal effect of the having clause should be. For example: “having count(*) > NNN” will use the optimizer’s standard 5% “guess” and “having count(*) = NNN” will use the standard 1% guess. However, having seen the group_by options I took a guess that there might be a having option to the opt_estimate() hint as well, so I tried it – with autotrace enabled here are three queries, first the unhinted baseline (which uses the standard 5% on my having clause) then a couple of others with hints to tweak the cardinality:

select  /*+
                qb_name(main)
        */
        mod(n1,10), count(*)
from    t1
group by
        mod(n1,10)
having
        count(*) > 100
;

select  /*+
                qb_name(main)
                opt_estimate(@main having scale_rows=0.4)
        */
        mod(n1,10), count(*)
from    t1
group by
        mod(n1,10)
having
        count(*) > 100
;

select  /*+
                qb_name(main)
                opt_estimate(@main group_by scale_rows=2)
                opt_estimate(@main having scale_rows=0.3)
        */
        mod(n1,10), count(*)
from    t1
group by
        mod(n1,10)
having
        count(*) > 100
;

The first query gives us the baseline cardinality of 10 (5% of 200). The second query scales the having cardinality down by a factor of 0.4  (with means an estimate of 4). The final query first doubles the group by cardinality (to 400), then scales the having cardinality (which would have become 20) down by a factor of 0.3 with the nett effect of producing a cardinality of 6. Here are the plans.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |      |    10 |    40 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  FILTER             |      |       |       |            |          |   --  10
|   2 |   HASH GROUP BY     |      |    10 |    40 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |   -- 200
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |      |     4 |    16 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  FILTER             |      |       |       |            |          |    --   4
|   2 |   HASH GROUP BY     |      |     4 |    16 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |    -- 200
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |      |     6 |    24 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  FILTER             |      |       |       |            |          |    --   6
|   2 |   HASH GROUP BY     |      |     6 |    24 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |    -- 400
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   |  3000 | 12000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s a little sad that the FILTER operation shows no estimate while the HASH GROUP BY operation shows the estimate after the application of the having clause. It would be nice to see the plan reporting the figures which I’ve added at the end of line for operations 1 and 2.

You may wonder why one would want to increase the estimate for the group by then reduce it for the having. While I’m not going to go to the trouble of creating a worked example it shouldn’t be too hard to appreciate the idea that the optimizer might use complex view merging to postpone a group by until after a join – so increasing the estimate for a group by might be necessary to ensure that that particular transformation doesn’t happen, while following this up with a reduction to the having might then ensure that the next join is a nested loop rather than a hash join. Of course, if you don’t need to be this subtle you might simply take advantage of yet another option to the opt_estimate() hint, the query_block option – but that will (probably) appear in the next article in this series.

 

opt_estimate 2

This is a note that was supposed to be a follow-up to an initial example of using the opt_estimate() hint to manipulate the optimizer’s statistical understanding of how much data it would access and (implicitly) how much difference that would make to the resource usage. Instead, two years later, here’s part two – on using opt_estimate() with nested loop joins. As usual I’ll start with a little data set:

rem
rem     Script:         opt_est_nlj.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Aug 2017
rem

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

create table t2
pctfree 75
as
select 
        mod(rownum,200)         n1,
        mod(rownum,200)         n2,
        rpad(rownum,180)        v1
from    dual
connect by
        level <= 3000 --> hint to avoid wordpress format issue
;

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

There are 3,000 rows in each table, with 200 distinct values for each of columns n1 and n2. There is an important difference between the tables, though, as the rows for a given value are well clustered in t1 and widely scattered in t2. I’m going to execute a join query between the two tables, ultimately forcing a very bad access path so that I can show some opt_estimate() hints making a difference to cost and cardinality calculations. Here’s my starting query, with execution plan, unhinted (apart from the query block name hint):

select
        /*+ qb_name(main) */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from    t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = 15
and     t2.n1 = t1.n2
;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |   225 | 83700 |    44   (3)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN                           |       |   225 | 83700 |    44   (3)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    15 |  2805 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | T2    |  3000 |   541K|    42   (3)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N2")
   3 - access("T1"."N1"=15)

You’ll notice the tablescan and hash join with t2 as the probe (2nd) table and a total cost of 44, which largely due to the tablescan cost of t2 (which I had deliberately defined with pctfree 75 to make the tablescan a little expensive). Let’s hint the query to do a nested loop from t1 to t2 to see why the hash join is preferred over the nested loop:

alter session set "_nlj_batching_enabled"=0;

select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                leading(t1 t2)
                use_nl(t2)
                index(t2)
                no_nlj_prefetch(t2)
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from    t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = 15
and     t2.n1 = t1.n2
;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |   225 | 83700 |   242   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                        |       |   225 | 83700 |   242   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    15 |  2805 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |    15 |  2775 |    16   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."N1"=15)
   5 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N2")

I’ve done two slightly odd things here – I’ve set a hidden parameter to disable nlj batching and I’ve used a hint to block nlj prefetching. This doesn’t change the arithmetic the optimizer uses, but it does mean the presentation of the nested loop goes back to the original pre-9i form which makes it a little easier to see costs and cardinalities adding and multiplying their way through the plan. I do not do this in production systems.

As you can see, the total cost is 242 with this plan and most of the cost is due to the indexed access into t2. The optimizer has correctly estimated that each probe of t2 will acquire 15 rows and that those 15 rows will be scattered across 15 blocks, so the join cardinality comes to 15 * 15 = 255 and the cost comes to: 2 (t1 cost) + (15 (t1 rows) * 16 (t2 unit cost)) = 242.

So let’s tell the optimizer that its estimated cardinality for the index range scan is wrong.

select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                leading(t1 t2)
                use_nl(t2)
                index(t2)
                no_nlj_prefetch(t2)
                opt_estimate(@main nlj_index_scan, t2@main (t1), t2_i1, scale_rows=0.06)
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from    t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = 15
and     t2.n1 = t1.n2
;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |   225 | 83700 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                        |       |   225 | 83700 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    15 |  2805 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |    15 |  2775 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."N1"=15)
   5 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N2")

I’ve used the hint opt_estimate(@main nlj_index_scan, t2@main (t1), t2_i1, scale_rows=0.06).

The form is: (@qb_name   nlj_index_scan,   target_table_alias   (list of possible driving tables),   target_index,   numeric_adjustment).

The numeric_adjustment could be rows=nnn or, as I have here, scale_rows=nnn; the target_index has to be specified by name rather than list of columns, and the list of possible driving tables should be a comma-separated list of fully-qualified table aliases. There’s a similar nlj_index_filter option which I can’t demonstrate in this post because it probably needs an index of at least two-columns before it can be used.

The things to note in this plan are: the index range scan at operation 5 has now has a cardinality (Rows) estimate of 1 (that’s 0.06 * the original 15). This hasn’t changed the cost of the range scan (because that cost was already one before we applied the opt_estimate() hint) but, because the cost of the table access is dependent on the index selectivity the cost of the table access is down to 2 (from 16). On the other hand the table cardinality hasn’t dropped so now it’s not consistent with the number of rowids predicted by the index range scan. The total cost of the query has dropped to 32, though, which is: 2 (t1 cost) + (15 (t1 rows) * 2 (t2 unit cost)).

Let’s try to adjust the prediction that the optimizer makes about the number of rows we fetch from the table. Rather than going all the way to being consistent with the index range scan I’ll dictate a scaling factor that will make it easy to see the effect – let’s tell the optimizer that we will get one-fifth of the originally expected rows (i.e. 3).

select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                leading(t1 t2)
                use_nl(t2)
                index(t2)
                no_nlj_prefetch(t2)
                opt_estimate(@main nlj_index_scan, t2@main (t1), t2_i1, scale_rows=0.06)
                opt_estimate(@main table         , t2@main     ,        scale_rows=0.20)
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from    t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = 15
and     t2.n1 = t1.n2
;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |    47 | 17484 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                        |       |    47 | 17484 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    15 |  2805 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |     3 |   555 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."N1"=15)
   5 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N2")

By adding the hint opt_estimate(@main table, t2@main, scale_rows=0.20) we’ve told the optimizer that it should scale the estimated row count down by a factor of 5 from whatever it calculates. Bear in mind that in a more complex query the optimizer might decide to follow the path we expected and that factor of 0.2 will be applied whenever t2 is accessed. Notice in this plan that the join cardinality at operation 1 has also dropped from 225 to 47 – if the optimizer is told that its cardinality (or selectivity) calculation is wrong for the table the numbers involved in the selectivity will carry on through the plan, producing a different “adjusted NDV” for the join cardinality calculation.

Notice, though, that the total cost of the query has not changed. The cost was dictated by the optimizer’s estimate of the number of table blocks to be visited after the index range scan. The estimated number of table blocks hasn’t changed, it’s just the number of rows we will find there that we’re now hacking.

Just for completion, let’s make one final change (again, something that might be necessary in a more complex query), let’s fix the join cardinality:

select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                leading(t1 t2)
                use_nl(t2)
                index(t2)
                no_nlj_prefetch(t2)
                opt_estimate(@main nlj_index_scan, t2@main (t1), t2_i1, scale_rows=0.06)
                opt_estimate(@main table         , t2@main     ,        scale_rows=0.20)
                opt_estimate(@main join(t2 t1)   ,                      scale_rows=0.5)
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from    t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = 15
and     t2.n1 = t1.n2
;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |    23 |  8556 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                        |       |    23 |  8556 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    15 |  2805 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |     2 |   370 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."N1"=15)
   5 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N2")

I’ve used the hint opt_estimate(@main join(t2 t1), scale_rows=0.5) to tell the optimizer to halve its estimate of the join cardinality between t1 and t2 (whatever order they appear in). With the previous hints in place the estimate had dropped to 47 (which must have been 46 and a large bit), with this final hint it has now dropped to 23. Interestingly the cardinality estimate for the table access to t2 has dropped at the same time (almost as if the optimizer has “rationalised” the join cardinality by adjusting the selectivity of the second table in the join – that’s something I may play around with in the future, but it may require reading a 10053 trace, which I tend to avoid doing).

Side not: If you have access to MoS you’ll find that Doc ID: 2402821.1 “How To Use Optimizer Hints To Specify Cardinality For Join Operation”, seems to suggest that the cardinality() hint is something to use for single table cardinalities, and implies that the opt_estimate(join) option is for two-table joins. In fact both hints can be used to set the cardinality of multi-table joins (where “multi” can be greater than 2).

Finally, then, let’s eliminate the hints that force the join order and join method and see what happens to our query plan if all we include is the opt_estimate() hints (and the qb_name() and no_nlj_prefetch hints and remember we’vs disabled “nlj batching“).

select
        /*+
                qb_name(main)
                no_nlj_prefetch(t2)
                opt_estimate(@main nlj_index_scan, t2@main (t1), t2_i1, scale_rows=0.06)
                opt_estimate(@main table         , t2@main     ,        scale_rows=0.20)
                opt_estimate(@main join(t2 t1)   ,                      scale_rows=0.5)
        */
        t1.v1, t2.v1
from    t1, t2
where
        t1.n1 = 15
and     t2.n1 = t1.n2
;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |    23 |  8556 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                        |       |    23 |  8556 |    32   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    15 |  2805 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |    15 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |     2 |   370 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T2_I1 |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."N1"=15)
   5 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N2")

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

WIth a little engineering on the optimizer estimates we’ve managed to con Oracle into using a different path from the default choice. Do notice, though, the closing Note section (which didn’t appear in all the other examples): I’ve left Oracle with the option of checking the actual stats as the query runs, so if I run the query twice Oracle might spot that the arithmetic is all wrong and throw in some SQL Plan Directives – which are just another load of opt_estimate() hints.

In fact, in this example, the plan we wanted became desirable as soon as we applied the nlj_ind_scan fix-up as this made the estimated cost of the index probe into t2 sufficiently low (even though it left an inconsistent cardinality figure for the table rows) that Oracle would have switched from the default hash join to the nested loop on that basis alone.

Closing Comment

As I pointed out in the previous article, this is just scratching the surface of how the opt_estimate() hint works, and even with very simple queries it can be hard to tell whether any behaviour we’ve seen is actually doing what we think it’s doing. In a third article I’ll be looking at something prompted by the most recent email I’ve had about opt_estimate() – how it might (or might not) behave in the presence of inline views and transformations like merging or pushing predicates. I’ll try not to take 2 years to publish it.

 

Ignoring Hints

One of the small changes (and, potentially big but temporary, threats) in 18.3 is the status of the “ignore hints” parameter. It ceases to be a hidden (underscore) parameter so you can now officially set parameter optimizer_ignore_hints to true in the parameter file, or at the system level, or at the session level. The threat, of course, it that some of your code may use the hidden version of the parameter (perhaps in an SQL_Patch as an opt_param() option rather than in its hint form) which no longer works after the upgrade.

But there’s more. The parameter (whether the old hidden version or the new revealed version) doesn’t make the optimizer ignore parallel() hints. But 18.3 now has a related parameter optimizer_ignore_parallel_hints to address this limitation. Here’s a quick demo – we start by creating a table and then running a query where the full tablescan is clearly the default strategy that the optimizer would take if we didn’t hint an indexed access path:

rem
rem     Script:         ignore_parallel_hints.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          May 2019
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)                  n1,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')             v1,
        lpad('x',100,'x')               padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e4 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

create index t1_i1 on t1(id);

set serveroutput off

prompt  =============
prompt  Baseline test
prompt  =============

select
        /*+ index(t1) */
        n1, sum(id)
from
        t1
where
        id > 0
group by
        n1
order by
        n1
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);


SQL_ID  gudnnk7j7q5bz, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select  /*+ index(t1) */  n1, sum(id) from  t1 where  id > 0 group by
n1 order by  n1

Plan hash value: 356059923

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |       |       |   198 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT GROUP BY                       |       |    10 |    70 |   198   (2)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    | 10000 | 70000 |   196   (1)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 | 10000 |       |    22   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("ID">0)

Now we repeat the exercise with the version-specific “alter session” command below – and you should try each option with each version of Oracle if you want to do the complete test cycle – to see that the session will ignore hints and the plan will change (side note – using the underscore version  with 18.3 doesn’t raise an error, the statement is silently ignored):

alter session set "_optimizer_ignore_hints" = true;
alter session set "optimizer_ignore_hints" = true;

SQL_ID  gudnnk7j7q5bz, child number 1
-------------------------------------
select  /*+ index(t1) */  n1, sum(id) from  t1 where  id > 0 group by
n1 order by  n1

Plan hash value: 3946799371

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |       |       |    27 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT GROUP BY     |      |    10 |    70 |    27  (12)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   | 10000 | 70000 |    25   (4)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("ID">0)

Then, of course, we have to test a query with a parallel() hint – or shared() hint, which is the internal equivalent you will notice occasionally in outlines or the “remote” statement for distributed execution plans – to show that we don’t yet ignore parallel queries – the plans following the code are from 18.3:

select
        /*+ parallel(t1 3) */
        n1, sum(id)
from
        t1
where
        id > 0
group by
        n1
order by
        n1
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

alter session set "optimizer_ignore_parallel_hints" = true;

select
        /*+ parallel(t1 3) */
        n1, sum(id)
from
        t1
where
        id > 0
group by
        n1
order by
        n1
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);




SQL_ID  7jynurdtc48kv, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select  /*+ parallel(t1 3) */  n1, sum(id) from  t1 where  id > 0 group
by  n1 order by  n1

Plan hash value: 2919148568

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |    TQ  |IN-OUT| PQ Distrib |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT         |          |       |       |    10 (100)|          |        |      |            |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR          |          |       |       |            |          |        |      |            |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (ORDER)     | :TQ10001 |    10 |    70 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,01 | P->S | QC (ORDER) |
|   3 |    SORT GROUP BY         |          |    10 |    70 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,01 | PCWP |            |
|   4 |     PX RECEIVE           |          |    10 |    70 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,01 | PCWP |            |
|   5 |      PX SEND RANGE       | :TQ10000 |    10 |    70 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,00 | P->P | RANGE      |
|   6 |       HASH GROUP BY      |          |    10 |    70 |    10  (10)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |
|   7 |        PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          | 10000 | 70000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,00 | PCWC |            |
|*  8 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1       | 10000 | 70000 |     9   (0)| 00:00:01 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   8 - access(:Z>=:Z AND :Z<=:Z) -- > comment added to avoid wordpress format issue
       filter("ID">0)

Note
-----
   - Degree of Parallelism is 3 because of table property


Session altered.


SQL_ID  7jynurdtc48kv, child number 1
-------------------------------------
select  /*+ parallel(t1 3) */  n1, sum(id) from  t1 where  id > 0 group
by  n1 order by  n1

Plan hash value: 3946799371

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation          | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |      |       |       |    27 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT GROUP BY     |      |    10 |    70 |    27  (12)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1   | 10000 | 70000 |    25   (4)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("ID">0)

tl;dr

In 18.3 Oracle exposes the parameter optimizer_ignore_hints – any code using depending on the hidden version of this parameter will no longer behave as expected. 18.3 also introduces optimiser_ignore_parallel_hints to allow you to ignore parallel hints as well.

 

Danger – Hints

It shouldn’t be possible to get the wrong results by using a hint – but hints are dangerous and the threat may be there if you don’t know exactly what a hint is supposed to do (and don’t check very carefully what has happened when you’ve used one that you’re not familiar with).

This post was inspired by a blog note from Connor McDonald titled “Being Generous to the Optimizer”. In his note Connor gives an example where the use of “flexible” SQL results in an execution plan that is always expensive to run when a more complex version of the query could produce a “conditional” plan which could be efficient some of the time and would be expensive only when there was no alternative. In his example he rewrote the first query below to produce the second query:

select data
from   address
where  ( :choice = 1 and street = :val )
or     ( :choice = 2 and suburb = :val )
;

select  data
from    address
where   ( :choice = 1 and street = :val )
union all
select  data
from    address
where   ( :choice = 2 and suburb = :val );

(We are assuming that bind variable :choice is constrained to be 1 or 2 and no other value.)

In its initial form the optimizer had to choose a tablescan for the query, in its final form the query can select which half of a UNION ALL plan to execute because the optimizer inserts a pair of FILTER operations that check the actual value of :choice at run-time.

When I started reading the example my first thought was to wonder why the optimizer hadn’t simply used “OR-expansion” (or concatenation if you’re running an older version), then I remembered that by the time the optimizer really gets going it has forgotten that “:choice” is the same bind variable in both cases, so doesn’t realise that it would use only one of two possible predicates. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t tell the optimizer to use concatenation. Here’s a model – modified slightly from Connor’s original:

rem
rem     Script:         122_or_expand_bug.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          May 2019
rem
rem     Last tested 
rem             19.3.0.0
rem

drop table address purge;
create table address ( street int, suburb int, post_code int,  data char(100));

insert into address
select mod(rownum,1e4), mod(rownum,10), mod(rownum,1e2), rownum
from dual connect by level  <= 1e5 -- > comment to avoid WordPress format issue
;

commit;

exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats('','ADDRESS')

create index ix1 on address ( street );
create index ix2 on address ( suburb );
create index ix3 on address ( post_code );

variable val number = 6
variable choice number = 1

alter session set statistics_level = all;
set serveroutput off
set linesize 180
set pagesize 60

select
        /*+ or_expand(@sel$1) */
        count(data)
from    address
where  ( :choice = 1 and street = :val )
or     ( :choice = 2 and suburb = :val )
;

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

I’ve added one more column to the table and indexed it – I’ll explain why later. I’ve also modified the query to show the output but restricted the result set to a count of the data column rather than a (long) list of rows.

Here’s the execution plan output when hinted:

SQL_ID  6zsh2w6d9mddy, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select  /*+ or_expand(@sel$1) */  count(data) from    address where  (
:choice = 1 and street = :val ) or     ( :choice = 2 and suburb = :val )

Plan hash value: 3986461375

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                               | Name            | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                        |                 |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      12 |     27 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                         |                 |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      12 |     27 |
|   2 |   VIEW                                  | VW_ORE_B7380F92 |      1 |  10010 |     10 |00:00:00.01 |      12 |     27 |
|   3 |    UNION-ALL                            |                 |      1 |        |     10 |00:00:00.01 |      12 |     27 |
|*  4 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |     10 |00:00:00.01 |      12 |     27 |
|   5 |      TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| ADDRESS         |      1 |     10 |     10 |00:00:00.01 |      12 |     27 |
|*  6 |       INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | IX1             |      1 |     10 |     10 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |     27 |
|*  7 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |
|*  8 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | ADDRESS         |      0 |  10000 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |      0 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('18.1.0')
      DB_VERSION('18.1.0')
      ALL_ROWS
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$9162BF3C_2")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$9162BF3C_1")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$9162BF3C")
      OR_EXPAND(@"SEL$1" (1) (2))
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$B7380F92")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$B7380F92" "VW_ORE_B7380F92"@"SEL$B7380F92")
      INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SET$9162BF3C_1" "ADDRESS"@"SET$9162BF3C_1" ("ADDRESS"."STREET"))
      BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SET$9162BF3C_1" "ADDRESS"@"SET$9162BF3C_1")
      FULL(@"SET$9162BF3C_2" "ADDRESS"@"SET$9162BF3C_2")
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter(:CHOICE=1)
   6 - access("STREET"=:VAL)
   7 - filter(:CHOICE=2)
   8 - filter(("SUBURB"=:VAL AND (LNNVL(:CHOICE=1) OR LNNVL("STREET"=:VAL))))

As you can see we have a UNION ALL plan with two FILTER operations, and the filter operations allow one or other of the two branches of the UNION ALL to execute depending on the value for :choice. Since I’ve reported the rowsource execution statistics you can also see that the table access through index range scan (operations 5 and 6) has executed once (Starts = 1) but the tablescan (operation 8) has not been executed at all.

If you check the Predicate Information you will see that operation 8 has introduced two lnnvl() predicates. Since the optimizer has lost sight of the fact that :choice is the same variable in both cases it has to assume that sometimes both branches will be relevant for a single execution, so it has to add predicates to the second branch to eliminate data that might have been found in the first branch. This is the (small) penalty we pay for avoiding a “fully-informed” manual rewrite.

Take a look at the Outline Data – we can see our or_expand() hint repeated there, and we can discover that it’s been enhanced. The hint should have been or_expand(@sel$1 (1) (2)). This might prompt you to modify the original SQL to use the fully qualified hint rather than the bare-bones form we’ve got so far. So let’s assume we do that before shipping the code to production.

Now imagine that a couple of months later an enhancement request appears to allow queries on post_code and the front-end has been set up so that we can specify a post_code query by selecting choice number 3. The developer who happens to pick up the change request duly modifies the SQL as follows:

select
        /*+ or_expand(@sel$1 (1) (2)) */
        count(data)
from    address
where  ( :choice = 1 and street = :val )
or     ( :choice = 2 and suburb = :val )
or     ( :choice = 3 and post_code = :val)
;

Note that we’ve got the “complete” hint in place, but there’s now a 3rd predicate. Do you think the hint is still complete ? What do you think will happen when we run the query ? Here’s the execution plan when I set :choice to 3.

select  /*+ or_expand(@sel$1 (1) (2)) */  count(data) from    address
where  ( :choice = 1 and street = :val ) or     ( :choice = 2 and
suburb = :val ) or     ( :choice = 3 and post_code = :val)

Plan hash value: 3986461375

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                               | Name            | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                        |                 |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                         |                 |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |
|   2 |   VIEW                                  | VW_ORE_B7380F92 |      1 |  10010 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|   3 |    UNION-ALL                            |                 |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  4 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|   5 |      TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| ADDRESS         |      0 |     10 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  6 |       INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | IX1             |      0 |     10 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  7 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
|*  8 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | ADDRESS         |      0 |  10000 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('18.1.0')
      DB_VERSION('18.1.0')
      ALL_ROWS
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$9162BF3C_2")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$9162BF3C_1")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$9162BF3C")
      OR_EXPAND(@"SEL$1" (1) (2))
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$B7380F92")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$B7380F92" "VW_ORE_B7380F92"@"SEL$B7380F92")
      INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SET$9162BF3C_1" "ADDRESS"@"SET$9162BF3C_1" ("ADDRESS"."STREET"))
      BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SET$9162BF3C_1" "ADDRESS"@"SET$9162BF3C_1")
      FULL(@"SET$9162BF3C_2" "ADDRESS"@"SET$9162BF3C_2")
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter(:CHOICE=1)
   6 - access("STREET"=:VAL)
   7 - filter(:CHOICE=2)
   8 - filter(("SUBURB"=:VAL AND (LNNVL(:CHOICE=1) OR LNNVL("STREET"=:VAL))))

We get a UNION ALL with two branches, one for :choice = 1, one for :choice = 2 and both of them show zero starts – and we don’t have any part of the plan to handle :choice = 3. The query returns no rows – and if you check the table creation code you’ll see it should have returned 1000 rows. An incorrect (historically adequate) hint has given us wrong results.

If we want the full hint for this new query we need to specify the 3rd predicate, by adding (3) to the existing hint to get the following plan (and correct results):

select  /*+ or_expand(@sel$1 (1) (2) (3)) */  count(data) from
address where  ( :choice = 1 and street = :val ) or     ( :choice = 2
and suburb = :val ) or     ( :choice = 3 and post_code = :val)

Plan hash value: 2153173029

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                               | Name            | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                        |                 |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |    1639 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                         |                 |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |    1639 |
|   2 |   VIEW                                  | VW_ORE_B7380F92 |      1 |  11009 |   1000 |00:00:00.01 |    1639 |
|   3 |    UNION-ALL                            |                 |      1 |        |   1000 |00:00:00.01 |    1639 |
|*  4 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|   5 |      TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| ADDRESS         |      0 |     10 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|*  6 |       INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | IX1             |      0 |     10 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|*  7 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|*  8 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | ADDRESS         |      0 |  10000 |      0 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |
|*  9 |     FILTER                              |                 |      1 |        |   1000 |00:00:00.01 |    1639 |
|* 10 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | ADDRESS         |      1 |    999 |   1000 |00:00:00.01 |    1639 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Outline Data
-------------
  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('18.1.0')
      DB_VERSION('18.1.0')
      ALL_ROWS
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$49E1C21B_3")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$49E1C21B_2")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$49E1C21B_1")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SET$49E1C21B")
      OR_EXPAND(@"SEL$1" (1) (2) (3))
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$B7380F92")
      OUTLINE(@"SEL$1")
      NO_ACCESS(@"SEL$B7380F92" "VW_ORE_B7380F92"@"SEL$B7380F92")
      INDEX_RS_ASC(@"SET$49E1C21B_1" "ADDRESS"@"SET$49E1C21B_1" ("ADDRESS"."STREET"))
      BATCH_TABLE_ACCESS_BY_ROWID(@"SET$49E1C21B_1" "ADDRESS"@"SET$49E1C21B_1")
      FULL(@"SET$49E1C21B_2" "ADDRESS"@"SET$49E1C21B_2")
      FULL(@"SET$49E1C21B_3" "ADDRESS"@"SET$49E1C21B_3")
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter(:CHOICE=1)
   6 - access("STREET"=:VAL)
   7 - filter(:CHOICE=2)
   8 - filter(("SUBURB"=:VAL AND (LNNVL(:CHOICE=1) OR LNNVL("STREET"=:VAL))))
   9 - filter(:CHOICE=3)
  10 - filter(("POST_CODE"=:VAL AND (LNNVL(:CHOICE=1) OR LNNVL("STREET"=:VAL)) AND (LNNVL(:CHOICE=2) OR
              LNNVL("SUBURB"=:VAL))))

We now have three branches to the UNION ALL, and the final branch (:choice =3) ran to show A-rows = 1000 selected in the tablescan.

Conclusion

You shouldn’t mess about with hints unless you’re very confident that you know how they work and then test extremely carefully – especially if you’re modifying old code that already contains some hints.

Note that in comment #2 below Nigel Bayliss has supplued a bug number for this – so if you think OR-expansion will help you, keep an eye open on MOS for patches relating to this bug.

Update Feb 2020

I’ve just checked the bug number supplied by Nigel Bayliss when I first posted this note (check doc Id 29817784.8 – the bug number itself is still not visible) and the bug was fixed a few months ago. The patch appears in 20.1, but there are a few backports to 19.5.

 

 

Append hint

One of the questions that came up on the CBO Panel Session at the UKOUG Tech2018 conference was about the /*+ append */ hint – specifically how to make sure it was ignored when it came from a 3rd party tool that was used to load data into the database. The presence of the hint resulted in increasing amounts of space in the table being “lost” as older data was deleted by the application which then didn’t reuse the space the inserts always went above the table’s highwater mark; and it wasn’t possible to change the application code.

The first suggestion aired was to create an SQL Patch to associate the hint /*+ ignore_optim_embedded_hints */ with the SQL in the hope that this would make Oracle ignore the append hint. This won’t work, of course, because the append hint is not an optimizer hint, it’s a “behaviour” hint.

There are, however, various things that will make the append hint invalid – sometimes to the great surprise of the people using it. The three things I can think of at present are:

• row-level triggers
• enabled foreign key constraints
• non-unique indexes enforcing unique constraints

It’s been some time since I last ran a detailed check so I’m not going to guarantee that the following claims are still true – if it matters to you then it’s easy enough to create a little test of (say) 10,000 rows inserted into a non-empty, indexed table.

• Row level triggers turn array processing into single row processing, so there’s a significant increase in redo generation.
• Non-unique indexes enforcing unique constraints have (small but) potentially undesirable effects on the optimizer and on run-time and may turn array processing into single row processing.
• Foreign key constraint require checking which may have some impact, but doesn’t turn array processing into single row processing.

Of the three options the foreign key constraint seemed to me to be the best strategy to disable the hint with minimal side effects, so my answer was:

“Create a new table with no data and a primary key constraint; add an invisible column to the target table, index it (online) and add a foreign key constraint from the column to the new table”.

My thinking on this was that the foreign key will disable the append hint. The column will always be null which means it will always satisfy the foreign key constraint without being checked and it won’t introduce any index maintenance overheads. Net effect: /*+ append */ is disabled with no extra overheads.

Footnote

The append hint is also ignored if the table is an Index Organized Table (IOT), but changing a heap table to an IOT is probably not a sensible choice if all you want to do is disable the hint – the potential for unexpected client side anomalies is too high, and if the table is heavily indexed the processing overhead for the secondary indexes could be fairly significant.

If I recall correctly the person asking the question said that the “do nothing” trigger option sounded like something they would be most comfortable with and they’d live with the overheads. I understand the feeling – an invisible column with an invisible index and extra foreign key constraint sounds too close to the boundary where mixing and matching simple features ends up hitting some unexpected behaviour (i.e. a bug).

Update 14th March 2019

A note on twitter has reminded me that distributed transactions introduce another limitation.  The append hint will work across a database link only if the insert is into a local table; the first insert below will accept the  hint, the second will not.

insert /*+ append */ into local_table select * from table@remote_location;

insert /*+ append */ into table@remote_location select * from local_table;

There are a couple more limitations given in the comments, viz: disable table locking, and adding a security policy (VPD / RLS / FGAC / OLS).

Hint Reports

Nigel Bayliss has posted a note about a frequently requested feature that has now appeared in Oracle 19c – a mechanism to help people understand what has happened to their hints.  It’s very easy to use, it’s just another format option to the “display_xxx()” calls in dbms_xplan; so I thought I’d run up a little demonstration (using an example I first generated 18 years and 11 versions ago) to make three points: first, to show the sort of report you get, second to show you that the report may tell you what has happened, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you why it has happened, and third to remind you that you should have stopped using the /*+ ordered */ hint 18 years ago.

I’ve run the following code on livesql:

rem
rem     Script:         c_ignorehint.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          March 2001
rem


drop table ignore_1;
drop table ignore_2;

create table ignore_1
nologging
as
select
        rownum          id,
        rownum          val,
        rpad('x',500)   padding
from    all_objects
where   rownum <= 3000
;

create table ignore_2
nologging
as
select
        rownum          id,
        rownum          val,
        rpad('x',500)   padding
from    all_objects
where   rownum <= 500
;

alter table ignore_2
add constraint ig2_pk primary key (id);


explain plan for
update
        (
                select
                        /*+
                                ordered
                                use_nl(i2)
                                index(i2,ig2_pk)
                        */
                        i1.val  val1,
                        i2.val  val2
                from
                        ignore_1        i1,
                        ignore_2        i2
                where
                        i2.id = i1.id
                and     i1.val <= 10
        )
set     val1 = val2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'hint_report'));

explain plan for
update
        (
                select
                        /*+
                                use_nl(i2)
                                index(i2,ig2_pk)
                        */
                        i1.val  val1,
                        i2.val  val2
                from
                        ignore_1        i1,
                        ignore_2        i2
                where
                        i2.id = i1.id
                and     i1.val <= 10
        )
set     val1 = val2
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display(null,null,'hint_report'));

As you can see I’ve simply added the format option “hint_report” to the call to dbms_xplan.display(). Before showing you the output I’ll just say a few words about the plans we might expect from the two versions of the update statement.

Given the /*+ ordered */ hint in the first statement we might expect Oracle to do a full tablescan of ignore_1 then do a nested loop into ignore_2 (obeying the use_nl() hint) using the (hinted) ig2_pk index. In the second version of the statement, and in the absence of the ordered hint, it’s possible that the optimizer will still use the same path but, in principle, it might find some other path.

So what do we get ? In order here are the two execution plans:

Plan hash value: 3679612214
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                             | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | UPDATE STATEMENT                      |          |    10 |   160 |   111   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  UPDATE                               | IGNORE_1 |       |       |            |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN                           |          |    10 |   160 |   111   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| IGNORE_2 |   500 |  4000 |    37   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     INDEX FULL SCAN                   | IG2_PK   |   500 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |    TABLE ACCESS STORAGE FULL          | IGNORE_1 |    10 |    80 |    74   (0)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("I2"."ID"="I1"."ID")
   5 - storage("I1"."VAL"<=10)
       filter("I1"."VAL"<=10)
 
Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 3 (U - Unused (1))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1 -  SEL$DA9F4B51
           -  ordered
 
   3 -  SEL$DA9F4B51 / I2@SEL$1
         U -  use_nl(i2)
           -  index(i2,ig2_pk)




Plan hash value: 1232653668
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                     | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | UPDATE STATEMENT              |          |    10 |   160 |    76   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  UPDATE                       | IGNORE_1 |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS                |          |    10 |   160 |    76   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   3 |    NESTED LOOPS               |          |    10 |   160 |    76   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS STORAGE FULL | IGNORE_1 |    10 |    80 |    74   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  5 |     INDEX UNIQUE SCAN         | IG2_PK   |     1 |       |     0   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| IGNORE_2 |     1 |     8 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - storage("I1"."VAL"<=10)
       filter("I1"."VAL"<=10)
   5 - access("I2"."ID"="I1"."ID")
 
Hint Report (identified by operation id / Query Block Name / Object Alias):
Total hints for statement: 2
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   5 -  SEL$DA9F4B51 / I2@SEL$1
           -  index(i2,ig2_pk)
           -  use_nl(i2)

As you can see, the “Hint Report” shows us how many hints have been seen in the SQL text, then the body of the report shows us which query block, operation and table (where relevant) each hint has been associated with, and whether it has been used or not.

The second query has followed exactly the plan I predicted for the first query and the report has shown us that Oracle noted, and used, the use_nl() and index() hints to access table ignore2, deciding for itself to visit the tables in the order ignore_1 -> ignore_2, and doing a full tablescan on ignore_1.

The first query reports three hints, but flags the use_nl() hint as unused. (There is (at least) one other flag that could appear against a hint – “E” for error (probably syntax error), so we can assume that this hint is not being ignored because there’s something wrong with it.) Strangely the report tells us that the optimizer has used the ordered hint but we can see from the plan that the tables appear to be in the opposite order to the order we specified in the from clause, and the chosen order has forced the optimizer into using an index full scan on ig2_pk because it had to obey our index() hint.  Bottom line – the optimizer has managed to find a more costly plan by “using but apparently ignoring” a hint that described the cheaper plan that we would have got if we hadn’t used the hint.

Explanation

Query transformation can really mess things up and you shouldn’t be using the ordered hint.

I’ve explained many times over the years that the optimizer evaluates the cost of an update statement by calculating the cost of selecting the rowids of the rows to be updated. In this case, which uses an updatable join view, the steps taken to follow this mechanism this are slightly more complex.  Here are two small but critical extracts from the 10053 trace file (taken from an 18c instance):

CVM:   Merging SPJ view SEL$1 (#0) into UPD$1 (#0)
Registered qb: SEL$DA9F4B51 0x9c9966e8 (VIEW MERGE UPD$1; SEL$1; UPD$1)

...

SQE: Trying SQ elimination.
Query after View Removal
******* UNPARSED QUERY IS *******
SELECT
        /*+ ORDERED INDEX ("I2" "IG2_PK") USE_NL ("I2") */
        0
FROM    "TEST_USER"."IGNORE_2" "I2",
        "TEST_USER"."IGNORE_1" "I1"
WHERE   "I2"."ID"="I1"."ID"
AND     "I1"."VAL"<=10

The optimizer has merged the UPDATE query block with the SELECT query block to produce a select statement that will produce the necessary plan (I had thought that i1.rowid would appear in the select list, but the ‘0’ will do for costing purposes). Notice that the hints have been preserved as the update and select were merged but, unfortunately, the merge mechanism has reversed the order of the tables in the from clause. So the optimizer has messed up our select statement, then obeyed the original ordered hint!

Bottom line – the hint report is likely to be very helpful in most cases but you will still have to think about what it is telling you, and you may still have to look at the occasional 10053 to understand why the report is showing you puzzling results. You should also stop using a hint that was replaced by a far superior hint more than 18 years ago – the ordered hint in my example should have been changed to /*+ leading(i1 i2) */ in Oracle 9i.

num_index_keys

The title is the name of an Oracle hint that came into existence in Oracle 10.2.0.3 and made an appearance recently in a question on the rarely used “My Oracle Support” Community forum (you’ll need a MOS account to be able to read the original). I wouldn’t have found it but the author also emailed me the link asking if I could take a look at it.  (If you want to ask me for help – without paying me, that is – then posting a public question in the Oracle (ODC) General Database or SQL forums and emailing me a private link is the strategy most likely to get an answer, by the way.)

The question was about a very simple query using a straightforward index – with a quirky change of plan after upgrading from 10.2.0.3 to 12.2.0.1. Setting the optimizer_features_enable to ‘10.2.0.3’ in the 12.2.0.1 system re-introduced the 10g execution plan. Here’s the query:

SELECT t1.*
   FROM   DW1.t1
  WHERE   t1.C1 = '0001' 
    AND   t1.C2 IN ('P', 'F', 'C')
    AND   t1.C3 IN (
                    '18110034450001',
                    '18110034450101',
                    '18110034450201',
                    '18110034450301',
                    '18110034450401',
                    '18110034450501'
          );
 

Information supplied: t1 holds about 500 million rows at roughly 20 rows per block, the primary key index is (c1, c2, c3, c4), there are just a few values for each of c1, c2 and c4, while c3 is “nearly unique” (which, for clarity, was expanded to “the number of distinct values of c3 is virtually the same as the number of rows in the table”).

At the moment we don’t have any information about histograms and we don’t known whether or not “nearly unique” might still allow a few values of c3 to have a large number of duplicates, so that’s something we might want to follow up on later.

Here are the execution plans – the fast one (from 10g) first, then the slow (12c) plan – and you should look carefully at the predicate section of the two plans:

10g (pulled from memory with rowsource execution statistics enabled)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                    | Name             | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |                  |      1 |        |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      58 |      5 |
|   1 |  INLIST ITERATOR             |                  |      1 |        |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      58 |      5 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T1               |     18 |      5 |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      58 |      5 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | PK_T1            |     18 |      5 |      6 |00:00:00.01 |      52 |      4 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."C1"='0001' AND (("T1"."C2"='C' OR "T1"."C2"='F' OR
              "T1"."C2"='P')) AND (("C3"='18110034450001' OR "C3"='18110034450101' OR
              "C3"='18110034450201' OR "C3"='18110034450301' OR "C3"='18110034450401' OR
              "C3"='18110034450501')))

 

12c (from explain plan)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name             | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |                  |     1 |   359 |     7   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  INLIST ITERATOR                     |                  |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1               |     1 |   359 |     7   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | PK_T1            |     1 |       |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."C1"='0001' AND ("T1"."C2"='C' OR "T1"."C2"='F' OR
              "T1"."C2"='P'))
       filter("C3"='18110034450001' OR "C3"='18110034450101' OR
              "C3"='18110034450201' OR "C3"='18110034450301' OR
              "C3"='18110034450401' OR "C3"='18110034450501')
  

When comparing plans it’s better, of course, to present the same sources from the two systems, it’s not entirely helpful to have the generated plan from explain plan in one version and a run-time plan with stats in the other – given the choice I’d like to see the run-time from both. Despite this, I felt fairly confident that the prediction would match the run-time for 12c and that I could at least guess the “starts” figure for 12c.

The important thing to notice is the way that the access predicate in 10g has split into an access predicate followed by a filter predicate in 12c. So 12c is going to iterate three times (once for each of the values  ‘C’, ‘F’, ‘P’) and then walk a potentially huge linked list of index leaf blocks looking for 6 values of c3, while 10g is going to probe the index 18 times (3 combinations of c2 x six combinations of c3) to find “nearly unique” rows which means probably one leaf block per probe.

The 12c plan was taking minutes to run, the 10g plan was taking less than a second. The difference in execution time was probably the effect of the 12c plan ranging through (literally) thousands of index leaf blocks.

There are many bugs and anomalies relating to in-list iteration and index range scans and cardinality calculations – here’s a quick sample of v$system_fix_control in 12.2.0.1:

select optimizer_feature_enable ofe, sql_feature, bugno, description
from v$system_fix_control
where
	optimizer_feature_enable between '10.2.0.4' and '12.2.0.1'
and	(   sql_feature like '%CBO%'
	 or sql_feature like '%CARDINALITY%'
	)
and	(    lower(description) like '%list%'
	 or  lower(description) like '%iterat%'
	 or  lower(description) like '%multi%col%'
	)
order by optimizer_feature_enable, sql_feature, bugno
;

OFE        SQL_FEATURE                      BUGNO DESCRIPTION
---------- --------------------------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------------------------
10.2.0.4   QKSFM_CBO_5259048              5259048 undo unused inlist
           QKSFM_CBO_5634346              5634346 Relax equality operator restrictions for multicolumn inlists

10.2.0.5   QKSFM_CBO_7148689              7148689 Allow fix of bug 2218788 for in-list predicates

11.1.0.6   QKSFM_CBO_5139520              5139520 kkoDMcos: For PWJ on list dimension, use part/subpart bits

11.2.0.1   QKSFM_CBO_6818410              6818410 eliminate redundant inlist predicates

11.2.0.2   QKSFM_CBO_9069046              9069046 amend histogram column tracking for multicolumn stats

11.2.0.3   QKSFM_CARDINALITY_11876260    11876260 use index filter inlists with extended statistics
           QKSFM_CBO_10134677            10134677 No selectivity for transitive inlist predicate from equijoin
           QKSFM_CBO_11834739            11834739 adjust NDV for list partition key column after pruning
           QKSFM_CBO_11853331            11853331 amend index cost compare with inlists as filters
           QKSFM_CBO_12591120            12591120 check inlist out-of-range values with extended statistics

11.2.0.4   QKSFM_CARDINALITY_12828479    12828479 use dynamic sampling cardinality for multi-column join key check
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_12864791    12864791 adjust for NULLs once for multiple inequalities on nullable colu
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_13362020    13362020 fix selectivity for skip scan filter with multi column stats
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_14723910    14723910 limit multi column group selectivity due to NDV of inlist column
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_6873091      6873091 trim histograms based on in-list predicates
           QKSFM_CBO_13850256            13850256 correct estimates for transitive inlist predicate with equijoin

12.2.0.1   QKSFM_CARDINALITY_19847091    19847091 selectivity caching for inlists
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_22533539    22533539 multi-column join sanity checks for table functions
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_23019286    23019286 Fix cdn estimation with multi column stats on fixed data types
           QKSFM_CARDINALITY_23102649    23102649 correction to inlist element counting with constant expressions
           QKSFM_CBO_17973658            17973658 allow partition pruning due to multi-inlist iterator
           QKSFM_CBO_21057343            21057343 order predicate list
           QKSFM_CBO_22272439            22272439 correction to inlist element counting with bind variables

There are also a number of system parameters relating to inlists that are new (or have changed values) in 12.2.0.1 when compared with 10.2.0.3 – but I’m not going to go into those right now.

I was sufficiently curious about this anomaly that I emailed the OP to say I would be happy to take a look at the 10053 trace files for the query – the files probably weren’t going to be very large given that it was only a single table query – but in the end it turned out that I solved the problem before he’d had time to email them. (Warning – don’t email me a 10053 file on spec; if I want one I’ll ask for it.)

Based on the description I created an initial model of the problem – it took about 10 minutes to code:

rem     Tested on 12.2.0.1, 18.3.0.1

drop table t1 purge;

create table t1 (
	c1 varchar2(4) not null,
	c2 varchar2(1) not null,
	c3 varchar2(15) not null,
	c4 varchar2(4)  not null,
	v1 varchar2(250)
)
;

insert into t1
with g as (
	select rownum id 
	from dual
	connect by level <= 1e4 -- > hint to avoid wordpress format issue
)
select
	'0001',
	chr(65 + mod(rownum,11)),
	'18110034'||lpad(1+100*rownum,7,'0'),
	lpad(mod(rownum,9),4,'0'),
	rpad('x',250,'x')
from
	g,g
where
        rownum <= 1e5 -- > hint to avoid wordpress format issue
;


create unique index t1_i1 on t1(c1, c2, c3, c4);

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

alter session set statistics_level = all;
set serveroutput off

prompt	==========================
prompt	Default optimizer features
prompt	==========================

select
        /*+ optimizer_features_enable('12.2.0.1') */
	t1.*
FROM	t1
WHERE
	t1.c1 = '0001' 
AND	t1.c2 in ('H', 'F', 'C')
AND	t1.c3 in (
		'18110034450001',
		'18110034450101',
		'18110034450201',
		'18110034450301',
		'18110034450401',
		'18110034450501'
	)
;

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

select 
        /*+ optimizer_features_enable('10.2.0.3') */
	t1.*
FROM	t1
WHERE
	t1.c1 = '0001' 
AND	t1.c2 in ('H', 'F', 'C')
AND	t1.c3 in (
		'18110034450001',
		'18110034450101',
		'18110034450201',
		'18110034450301',
		'18110034450401',
		'18110034450501'
	)
;

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

alter session set statistics_level = all;
set serveroutput off

The two queries produced the same plan – regardless of the setting for optimizer_features_enable – it was the plan originally used by the OP’s 10g setting:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                    | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |       |      1 |        |    20 (100)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |      35 |
|   1 |  INLIST ITERATOR             |       |      1 |        |            |      0 |00:00:00.01 |      35 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| T1    |     18 |      2 |    20   (0)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |      35 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | T1_I1 |     18 |      2 |    19   (0)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |      35 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."C1"='0001' AND (("T1"."C2"='C' OR "T1"."C2"='F' OR "T1"."C2"='H')) AND
              (("T1"."C3"='18110034450001' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450101' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450201' OR
              "T1"."C3"='18110034450301' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450401' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450501')))

There was one important difference between the 10g and the 12c plans – in 10g the cost of the table access (hence the cost of the total query) was 20; in 12c it jumped to 28 – maybe there’s a change in the arithmetic for costing the iterator, and maybe that’s sufficient to cause a problem.

Before going further it’s worth checking what the costs would look like (and, indeed, if the plan is possible in both versions) if we force Oracle into the “bad” plan. That’s where we finally get to the hint in the title of this piece. If I add the hint /*+ num_index_keys(t1 t1_i1 2) */ what’s going to happen ? (Technically I’ve included a hint to use the index, and specified the query block name to make sure Oracle doesn’t decide to switch to a tablescan):

select
        /*+
            optimizer_features_enable('12.2.0.1')
            index_rs_asc(@sel$1 t1@sel$1 (t1.c1 t1.c2 t1.c3 t1.c4))
            num_index_keys(@sel$1 t1@sel$1 t1_i1 2)
        */
        t1.*
FROM        t1
WHERE
        t1.c1 = '0001'
AND        t1.c2 in ('H', 'F', 'C')
AND        t1.c3 in (
                '18110034450001',
                '18110034450101',
                '18110034450201',
                '18110034450301',
                '18110034450401',
                '18110034450501'
        )
;

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |      1 |        |   150 (100)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |     154 |      1 |
|   1 |  INLIST ITERATOR                     |       |      1 |        |            |      0 |00:00:00.01 |     154 |      1 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |      3 |     18 |   150   (2)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |     154 |      1 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_I1 |      3 |     18 |   142   (3)|      0 |00:00:00.01 |     154 |      1 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("T1"."C1"='0001' AND (("T1"."C2"='C' OR "T1"."C2"='F' OR "T1"."C2"='H')))
       filter(("T1"."C3"='18110034450001' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450101' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450201' OR
              "T1"."C3"='18110034450301' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450401' OR "T1"."C3"='18110034450501'))

This was the plan from 12.2.0.1 – and again the plan for 10.2.0.3 was identical except for costs which became 140 for the index range scan and 141 for the table access. At first sight it looks like 10g may be using the total selectivity of the entire query as the scaling factor for the index clustering_factor to find the table cost while 12c uses the cost of accessing the table for one iteration (rounding up) before multiplying by the number of iterations.

Having observed this detail I thought I’d do a quick test of what happened by default if I requested 145 distinct values of c3. Both versions defaulted to the access/filter path rather than the pure access path – but again there was a difference in costs. The 10g index cost was 140 with a table access cost of 158, while 12c had an index cost of 179 and a table cost of 372. So both versions switch plans at some point – do they switch at the same point ? Reader, I could not resist temptation, so I ran a test loop. With my data set the 12c version switched paths at 61 values in the in-list and 10g switched at 53 values –

Conclusion: there’s been a change in the selectivity calculations for the use of in-list iterators, which leads to a change in costs, which can lead to a change in plans; the OP was just unlucky with his data set and stats. Possibly there’s something about his data or stats that makes the switch appear with a much smaller in-list than mine.

Footnote:

When I responded to the thread on MOSC with the suggestion that the problem was in part due to statistics and might be affected by out of date stats (or a histogram on the (low-frequency) c2 column) the OP noted that stats hadn’t been gathered since some time in August – and found that the 12c path changed to the efficient (10g) one after re-gathering stats on the table.