Quiz night

Here’s a script to create a table, with index, and collect stats on it. Once I’ve collected stats I’ve checked the execution plan to discover that a hint has been ignored (for a well-known reason):

create table t2
as
select
        mod(rownum,200)         n1,
        mod(rownum,200)         n2,
        rpad(rownum,180)        v1
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 3000
;

create index t2_i1 on t2(n1);

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

explain plan for
select  /*+ index(t2) */
        n1
from    t2
where   n2 = 45
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

----------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |
----------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |      |    15 |   120 |    15 |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2   |    15 |   120 |    15 |
----------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter("N2"=45)

Of course we don’t expect the optimizer to use the index because we didn’t declare n1 to be not null, so there may be rows in the table which do not appear in the index. The only option the optimizer has for getting the right answer is to use a full tablescan. So the question is this – how come Oracle will obey the hint in the following SQL statement:

explain plan for
select
        /*+
                leading (t2 t1)
                index(t2) index(t1)
                use_nl(t1)
        */
        t2.n1, t1.n2
from
        t2      t2,
        t2      t1
where
        t2.n2 = 45
and     t2.n1 = t1.n1
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                             | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                      |       |   225 |  3600 |  3248 |
|   1 |  NESTED LOOPS                         |       |   225 |  3600 |  3248 |
|   2 |   NESTED LOOPS                        |       |   225 |  3600 |  3248 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T2    |    15 |   120 |  3008 |
|   4 |     INDEX FULL SCAN                   | T2_I1 |  3000 |       |     8 |
|*  5 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                   | T2_I1 |    15 |       |     1 |
|   6 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID         | T2    |    15 |   120 |    16 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter("T2"."N2"=45)
   5 - access("T2"."N1"="T1"."N1")

I ran this on 11.2.0.4, but it does the same on earlier versions.

Update:

This was clearly too easy – posted at 18:04, answered correctly at 18:21. At some point in it’s evolution the optimizer acquired a rule that allowed it to infer unwritten “is not null” predicates from the join predicate.

 

 

 

Cluster Nulls

Yesterday’s posting was a reminder that bitmap indexes, unlike B-tree indexes in Oracle,  do store entries where every column in the index is null. The same is true for cluster indexes – which are implemented as basic B-tree indexes. Here’s a test case I wrote to demonstrate the point.

drop table tc1;
drop cluster c including tables;

purge recyclebin;

create cluster c(val number);
create index c_idx on cluster c;
create table tc1 (val number, n1 number, padding varchar2(100)) cluster c(val);

insert into tc1
select
	decode(rownum,1,to_number(null),rownum), rownum, rpad('x',100)
from
	all_objects
where
	rownum <= 100
;

insert into tc1 select * from tc1;
insert into tc1 select * from tc1;
insert into tc1 select * from tc1;
insert into tc1 select * from tc1;
insert into tc1 select * from tc1;
commit;

analyze cluster c compute statistics;
execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'tc1');

set autotrace traceonly explain

select * from tc1 where val = 2;
select * from tc1 where val is null;

set autotrace off

Here are the two execution plans from the above queries:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |       |    32 |  3424 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  TABLE ACCESS CLUSTER| TC1   |    32 |  3424 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   INDEX UNIQUE SCAN  | C_IDX |     1 |       |     0   (0)| 00:00:01 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("VAL"=2)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |      |    32 |  3424 |    14   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| TC1  |    32 |  3424 |    14   (0)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - filter("VAL" IS NULL)

Spot the problem: the second query doesn’t use the index. So, despite the fact that I said that fully null index entries are stored in cluster indexes you might (as the first obvious question) wonder whether or not I was right. So here’s a piece of the symbolic dump of the index.

kdxconro 100                -- Ed: 100 entries (rows) in the leaf block

row#0[8012] flag: -----, lock: 0, data:(8):  02 00 02 0b 00 00 01 00
col 0; len 2; (2):  c1 03

row#1[7999] flag: -----, lock: 0, data:(8):  02 00 02 0c 00 00 01 00
col 0; len 2; (2):  c1 04

...

row#98[6738] flag: -----, lock: 2, data:(8):  02 00 02 6d 00 00 01 00
col 0; len 2; (2):  c2 02

row#99[8025] flag: -----, lock: 0, data:(8):  02 00 02 0a 00 00 01 00
col 0; NULL

The NULL entry is right there – sorted as the high value – just as it is in a bitmap index. But the optimizer won’t use it, even if you hint it.

Of course, Oracle uses it internally when inserting rows (how else, otherwise, would it rapidly find which the heap block needed for the next NULL insertion) – but it won’ use it to retrieve the data, it always uses a full table (cluster) scan. That’s really a little annoying if you’ve made the mistake of allowing nulls into your cluster.

There is a workaround, of course – in this case (depending on version) you could create a virtual column with index or a function-based index that (for example) uses the nvl2() function to convert nulls to a know value and all non-null entries to null; this would give you an index on just the original nulls which would be as small as possible and also have a very good clustering_factor. You’d have to change the code from “column is not null” to a predicate that matched the index, though. For example:

create index tc1_null on tc1(nvl2(val,null,0));

execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'tc1', method_opt=>'for all hidden columns size 1');

select * from tc1 where nvl2(val,null,0) = 0;

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |          |    32 |  3456 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| TC1      |    32 |  3456 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   INDEX RANGE SCAN          | TC1_NULL |    32 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access(NVL2("VAL",NULL,0)=0)

I’ve included the compress keyword (which implicitly means “all columns” for a non-unique index) in the definition since you only need 4 repetitions of the single-byte entry that is the internal representation of zero before you start to win on the storage trade-off – but since it’s likely to be a small index anyway that’s not particularly important. (Reminder: although Oracle collects index stats on index creation, you still need to collect column stats on the hidden column underlying the function-based columns on the index to give the optimizer full information.)

Bitmap Nulls

It’s fairly well known that in Oracle B-tree indexes on heap tables don’t hold entries where all the indexed columns are all null, but that bitmap indexes will hold such entries and execution plans can for predicates like “column is null” can use bitmap indexes. Here’s a little test case to demonstrate the point (I ran this last on 12.1.0.1):

create table t1 (val number, n1 number, padding varchar2(100));

insert into t1
select
	decode(rownum,1,to_number(null),rownum), rownum, rpad('x',100)
from
	all_objects
where
	rownum <= 1000
;

insert into t1 select * from t1;
insert into t1 select * from t1;
insert into t1 select * from t1;
insert into t1 select * from t1;
insert into t1 select * from t1;

commit;

create bitmap index t1_b1 on t1(val);

execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'t1');

set autotrace traceonly explain

select * from t1 where val is null;

set autotrace off

The execution plan for this query, in the system I happened to be using, looked like this:

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 1201576309

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                           | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                    |       |    32 |  3488 |     8   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   1 |  TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    32 |  3488 |     8   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   2 |   BITMAP CONVERSION TO ROWIDS       |       |       |       |            |          |
|*  3 |    BITMAP INDEX SINGLE VALUE        | T1_B1 |       |       |            |          |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("VAL" IS NULL)

Note that the predicate section shows us that we used the “column is null” predicate as an access predicate into the index.

Of course, this is a silly little example – I’ve only published it to make a point and to act as a reference case if you ever need to support a claim. Normally we don’t expect a single bitmap index to be a useful way to access a table, we tend to use combinations of bitmap indexes to combine a number of predicates so that we can minimise the trips to a table as efficiently as possible. (And we certainly DON’T create a bitmap index on an OLTP system because it lets us access NULLs by index — OLTP and bitmaps don’t get on well together.)

If you do a symbolic block dump, by the way, you’ll find that the NULL is represented by the special “length byte” of 0xFF with no following data.

NVL()

Here’s a little detail about how the optimizer can handle the nvl() function that I hadn’t noticed before (and it goes back to at least 8i). This is running on 11.2.0.3, and table t1 is just all_objects where rownum <= 20000:

Null – again

Here’s a (camouflaged) constraint definition I came across a little while ago in a production system:

create table t1 (
	v1 varchar2(10),
	constraint c1 check (v1 = 'A' or v1 = null)
);

Quick question – will the following insert statement work or return an error ?

insert into t1 values('B');

NULL

A recent question from OTN:

What’s the difference between “{expression} is null” and “{expression}= null” ?

Technically we can say the following:

• {expression} is null will evaluate to one of TRUE or FALSE
• {expression} = null will evaluate to NULL

As a follow on from this: a predicate is satisfied if (and only if) it evaluates to TRUE; a constraint is satisfied if (and only if) it doesn’t evaluate to FALSE.

Three-valued logic catches everybody out occasionally.

Constraints

There’s an important detail about constraints – check constraints in particular – that’s easy to forget, and likely to lead you into errors. Here’s a little cut-n-paste demo from an SQL*Plus session:

SQL> select count(*) from t1;

  COUNT(*)
----------
         4

1 row selected.

SQL>
SQL> alter table t1 add constraint t1_ck_v1 check (v1 in ('a','b','c'));

Table altered.

SQL>
SQL> select count(*) from t1 where v1 in ('a','b','c');

  COUNT(*)
----------
         3

1 row selected.

We count the number of rows in a table – and it’s four.
We add a constraint to restrict the values for a certain column – and every column survives the check.
We use the corresponding predicate to count the number of rows that match the check constraint – and we’ve lost a row !

Why ?

A predicate returns a row if it evaluates to TRUE.
A constraint allows a row if it does not evaluate to FALSE - which means it is allowed to evaluate to TRUE or to NULL.

I have one row in the table where v1 is null, and for that row the check constraint evaluates to NULL, which is not FALSE. So the row passes the check constraint, but doesn’t get returned by the predicate. I think it’s worth mentioning this difference because from time to time I see production systems that “lose” data because of this oversight.

To make the constraint consistent with the predicate I would probably add a NOT NULL declaration to the column or rewrite the constraint as (v1 is not null and v1 in (‘a’,’b’,’c’)).

nullif()

Have you ever written SQL that had to protect against a “divide by zero” error ?

The way I used to do this was typically to introduce a decode() function to produce some vaguely appropriate result if the divisor were zero; but there is a tidier option that appeared a few years ago. For example:

Good Nulls

I’ve often been heard to warn people of the accidents that can happen when they forget about the traps that appear when you start allowing columns to be NULL – but sometimes NULLs are good, especially when it helps Oracle understand where the important (e.g. not null) data might be.

An interesting example of this came up on OTN a few months ago where someone was testing the effects of changing a YES/NO column into a YES/NULL column (which is a nice idea because it allows you to create a very small index on the YESes, and avoid creating a histogram to tell the optimizer that the number of YESes is small).

They were a little puzzled, though, about why their tests showed Oracle using an index to find data in the YES/NO case, but not using the index in the YES/NULL case. I supplied a short explanation on the thread, and was planning to post a description on the blog, but someone on the thread supplied a link to AskTom where Tom Kyte had already answered the question, so I’m just going to leave you with a link to his explanation.

Hints and Nulls

From time to time I check the site statistics to see if they give me any clues about why people are coming to blog – and recently I noticed that over the last year a particular referral from the OTN Database forum was had appeared fairly regularly – and it’s one that covers a small but significant optimizer detail that combines two crtical questions:  why is the optimizer not using my index and why is the optimizer ignoring my hint under the heading “Index hint does not work”.

I’ll leave you to read the thread – but the short answer is NULL.

A hint is illegal if using it could produce the wrong answer, and indexes where every column is nullable won’t necessarily reference every row in its table.

[Further reading on “ignoring hints”]