Rebuilding Indexes

One of the special events that can make it necessary to rebuild an index is the case of the “massive DML”, typically a bulk delete that purges old data from a table. You may even find cases where it’s a good idea to mark a couple of your indexes as unusable before doing a massive delete and then rebuild them after the delete.

Despite the fact that a massive delete is an obvious special case it’s still not necessary in many cases to worry about a rebuild afterwards because the space made free by the delete will be smoothly reused over time with very little variation in performance. There is, however, one particular feature that increases the probability of a rebuild becoming necessary – global (or globally partitioned) indexes on partitioned tables. The problem (and the absence of problem in non-partitioned tables) is in the nature of the rowid.

For non-partitioned tables, and partitioned tables with local indexes, the rowid stored in an index is (assuming we’re thinking only of heap tables) stored as a sequence of 6 bytes consisting, in order, of: (tablespace relative file number, block number within file, row number within block). If the table is non-partitioned, or if this is an index segment from a locally partitioned index, all the index entries will be pointing to the same table segment and Oracle knows which segment that is from the data dictionary information – so Oracle can derive the data_object_id of the table segment and convert the tablespace relative file number into the absolute file number to navigate to the right row in the table.

When the index is global or globally partitioned any index entry may point to any of the table’s segments, so the rowid that is stored in the index is expanded by a further 4 bytes to hold the data_object_id of the table segment it is pointing to – and the data_object_id is the leading component: (data_object_id, tablespace relative file number, block number within file, row number within block). Think about what this means when you start to drop “old” partitions and add new partitions. Compare this with what happens when you simply delete a large volume of old data from a table and starting inserting new data. There’s an important difference to the way in which indexes will evolve.

Purging data

When you delete a large volume of data from a (simple, heap) table you will create a lot of empty space in a lot of existing table blocks. If that delete is supposed to get rid of “old” data (and to keep the description simple we’ll assume it’s the first time you’ve done this) it’s very likely that the delete will result in lots of empty blocks near the start of the table – rows that were inserted at the same time will tend to be physically close to each other in the table. This means that future inserts will soon start to reuse those table blocks. Think about what this means for index entries – especially for non-unique keys.

Assume you have 100 rows with value ‘XXX’ for an indexed column. Breaking the rowid into its component parts the index entries will be (‘XXX’,{file_id, block_id, row_number}).  Now assume you delete the oldest 10 rows then, over time, insert 10 more rows with the same key value. You’ve deleted the 10 index entries with the lowest values for (file_id, block_id) but the space that’s become available in the table will be in and around exactly that range of blocks – so the new index entries will probably end up looking very similar to the deleted index entries and inserted in and around the existing index entries for value ‘XXX’, so over time the index is unlikely to allocate much new space.

Now think about what happens when your table it partitioned but the index is global; your index entries are (‘XXX’,{data_object_id, file_id, block_id, row_number}). When you drop the oldest partition you will probably^[1] delete all the index entries with the lowest data_object_id. When you start inserting new rows for ‘XXX’ the new table partition will have a data_object_id that is going to be higher than any previous data_object_id – which means you’re going to be inserting rows into the right-hand (high-value) edge of this section of the index. In some cases – typically those where you have a couple of leaf blocks per key value – the index may end up growing significantly because the insertion point for rows in the new partition isn’t in the leaf block with the available space, and it won’t be until you’ve done a few more bulk deletes and the leaf blocks relating to the oldest table partitions become completely empty that the space can be reused.

An example of this type of behaviour probably appeared on the OTN database forum quite recently.  Of course, there are various reasons why indexes can become inefficient, and the degree of inefficiency may only become noticeable over a fairly long period of time; moreover there are various reasons why global indexes are a little problematic, and various reasons why a bulk delete (which is what executing “alter table drop partition” does to a global index) has unpleasant side effects dependent somewhat on the number (and size) of the partitions and on how many you try to drop in one go.

There’s not  a lot you can do about this quirk of global indexes, but it’s always worth taking extra care with partitioned tables and focusing even more carefully on a strategic review of indexes:

• Does this index really need to exist at all
• Could this index be replaced by a selective function-based index
• Does this index really need to be global / globally partitioned
• How big is this index compared to the size it ought to be
• Should this index be (basic) compressed
• Is this index likely to be disrupted by a historic purge – or is there another reason for its undesirable behaviour

 

^[1] probably delete entries with the lowest data_object_id” – I have to say this because if you’ve executed a “move partition” at any time a new data_object_id will have been generated for the partition, so the oldest partition could, in principal, have the highest data_object_id. The issue of changing data_object_ids brings a whole new level of complexity to global indexes – but only in a few special cases, fortunately.

 

 

12.2 Partitions

At the end of my presentation to the UKOUG Database SIG yesterday I summed up (most) of points I’d made with a slide making the claim:

In 12.2 you can: Convert a simple table to partitioned with multi-column automatic list partitions, partially indexed, with read only segments, filtering out unwanted data, online in one operation.

 

Last night I decided I ought to demonstrate the claim – so here’s a little code, first creating a simple heap table:

rem
rem     Script:         122_features.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          June 2017
rem
rem     Last tested
rem             12.2.0.1
rem

create table t1(
        date_start      not null,
        date_end        not null,
        id              not null,
        client_id,
        resort_code,
        uk_flag,
        v1,
        padding,
        constraint t1_range_ck check ((date_end - date_start) in (7, 14, 21))
)
segment creation immediate
nologging
as
with generator as (
        select
                rownum id
        from dual
        connect by
                level <= 1e4
)
select
        trunc(sysdate,'yyyy') + 7 *  mod(rownum, 8)                                     date_start,
        trunc(sysdate,'yyyy') + 7 * (mod(rownum, 8) + trunc(dbms_random.value(1,4)))    date_end,
        rownum                                          id,
        trunc(dbms_random.value(1e5,2e5))               client_id,
        trunc(dbms_random.value(1e4,2e4))               resort_code,
        case when mod(rownum,275) = 0 then 1 end        uk_flag,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')                             v1,
        lpad('x',100,'x')                               padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e5 -- > "GT" inserted to avoid WordPress formatting issue
;

create index t1_client_idx on t1(client_id);
create index t1_resort_idx on t1(resort_code);
create index t1_ukflag_idx on t1(uk_flag);

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

I’ve got a table which models a travel company that arranges holidays that last one, two, or three weeks and (for convenience) they all start on the same day for the week. So I generate a start and end date for each row, making sure the start date is a multiple of seven days from a base date while the end date is 7, 14, or 21 days later. I’ve got a few indexes on the data, and a primary key constraint. There’s a special flag column on the table for holidays in the UK, which is a small parcentage of the holidays booked.

Eventually, when the data gets too big, I decide that I want to partition this data, and the obvious partitioning idea that springs to mind is to partition it so that holidays with the same start date and duration are all in the same partition and each partition holds a single start/duration.

I’ve also decided that I’m going to make old data read-only, and I’m not interested in the UK holidays once they gone into history so I’m going to get rid of some of them.

The index protecting the primary key will have to be global since it won’t contain the partition key; since the index on uk_flag covers a small amount of data I’m going to keep that global as well, but I want the other two indexes to be local – except for the older data I’m not really interested in keeping the index on client id.

And I don’t want to stop the application while I’m restructuring the data.

So here’s my one SQL statement:

alter table t1 modify 
partition by list (date_start, date_end) automatic (
        partition p11 values (to_date('01-Jan-2017'),to_date('08-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p12 values (to_date('01-Jan-2017'),to_date('15-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p13 values (to_date('01-Jan-2017'),to_date('22-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p21 values (to_date('08-Jan-2017'),to_date('15-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p22 values (to_date('08-Jan-2017'),to_date('22-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p23 values (to_date('08-Jan-2017'),to_date('29-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p31 values (to_date('15-Jan-2017'),to_date('22-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p32 values (to_date('15-Jan-2017'),to_date('29-Jan-2017')) indexing off read only,
        partition p33 values (to_date('15-Jan-2017'),to_date('05-Feb-2017')) indexing off read only
)
including rows where uk_flag is null or (date_start > to_date('01-feb-2017','dd-mon-yyyy'))
online
update indexes (
        t1_client_idx local indexing partial,
        t1_resort_idx local,
        t1_ukflag_idx indexing partial
)
;

Key Points

• partition by list (date_start, date_end) — partitioned by a multi-column list
• automatic — if data arrives for which there is on existing partition a new one will be created
• indexing off — some of my partitions (the pre-defined (oldest) ones) will be subject to partial indexing
• read only — some of my partitions (the pre-defined (oldest) ones) will be made read only
• including rows where — some of my rows will disappear during copying ^[1]
• online — Oracle will be journalling the data while I copy and apply the journey at the end
• update indexes – specify some details about indexes ^[2]
• local — some of the rebuilt indexes will be local
• indexing partial — some of the rebuilt indexes will not hold data (viz: for the partitions declared “indexing off”)

I’ve footnoted a couple of the entries:

[1] – the copy is done read-consistently, so data inserted while the copy takes place will still appear in the final table, even if it looks as if it should have failed the including rows clause.

[2] – indexes which include the partition key will automatically be created as local indexes (and you can declare them here as global, or globally partitioned, if you want to). The manual has an error on this point; it suggests that prefixed indexes will be created as local indexes but then defines “prefixed” to mean “contains the partition key” rather than the usual “starts with the partition key”.

Job done – except for the exhaustive tests that it’s been done correctly, the load test to see how it behaves when lots of new holidays are being booked and current ones being modified, and a little bit of clearing up of “surprise” partitions that shouldn’t be there and changing some of the automatically generated table partitions to be “indexing off” (if and when necessary).

Here are a few queries – with results – showing the effects this one statement had:

select count(*) from t1;

/*
  COUNT(*)
----------
     99773

-- some rows (old UK) have disappeared from the original 10,000
*/


select
        index_name, partitioned, status, leaf_blocks, num_rows , indexing, orphaned_entries
from
        user_indexes
where   table_name = 'T1'
order by
        partitioned, index_name
;

/*
INDEX_NAME           PAR STATUS   LEAF_BLOCKS   NUM_ROWS INDEXIN ORP
-------------------- --- -------- ----------- ---------- ------- ---
T1_PK                NO  VALID            263      99773 FULL    NO
T1_UKFLAG_IDX        NO  VALID              1        136 PARTIAL NO
T1_CLIENT_IDX        YES N/A              149      62409 PARTIAL NO
T1_RESORT_IDX        YES N/A              239      99773 FULL    NO

-- Indexes: Local or global, full or partial.
*/

select
        segment_type, segment_name, count(*)
from
        user_segments
group by
        segment_type, segment_name
order by
        segment_type desc, segment_name
;

/*
SEGMENT_TYPE       SEGMENT_NAME                COUNT(*)
------------------ ------------------------- ----------
TABLE PARTITION    T1                                24
INDEX PARTITION    T1_CLIENT_IDX                     15
INDEX PARTITION    T1_RESORT_IDX                     24
INDEX              T1_PK                              1
INDEX              T1_UKFLAG_IDX                      1

-- One local index has fewer segments than the other
*/

set linesize 180
set trimspool on

column high_value format a85
break on index_name skip 1
set pagesize 200

select
        index_name, status, leaf_blocks, num_rows, partition_name, high_value
from
        user_ind_partitions
where
        index_name = 'T1_CLIENT_IDX'
--      index_name like 'T1%'
order by
        index_name, partition_position
;

/*
INDEX_NAME           STATUS   LEAF_BLOCKS   NUM_ROWS PARTITION_NAME         HIGH_VALUE
-------------------- -------- ----------- ---------- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T1_CLIENT_IDX        UNUSABLE           0          0 P11                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-08 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P12                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-15 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P13                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-22 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P21                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-08 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-15 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P22                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-08 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-22 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P23                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-08 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-29 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P31                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-15 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-22 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P32                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-15 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-29 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     UNUSABLE           0          0 P33                    ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-15 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-05 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4126 SYS_P1528              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-22 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4198 SYS_P1529              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-29 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-19 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4211 SYS_P1530              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-19 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4214 SYS_P1531              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-26 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4195 SYS_P1532              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-19 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-03-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4113 SYS_P1533              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-22 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-01-29 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE             9       4027 SYS_P1534              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-29 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4217 SYS_P1535              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-19 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4167 SYS_P1536              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-19 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-03-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4230 SYS_P1537              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-29 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4113 SYS_P1538              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-26 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4069 SYS_P1539              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-03-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4215 SYS_P1540              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-01-22 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4138 SYS_P1541              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-19 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-26 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )

                     USABLE            10       4176 SYS_P1542              ( TO_DATE(' 2017-02-05 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                            , TO_DATE(' 2017-02-12 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss', 'nls_calendar=gregorian')
                                                                             )


*/

I’ve limited the index partition output to the index with partial indexing enabled so show that it’s the pre-defined partitions are marked as unusable and, as you can infer from the segement summary, those unusable index partition don’t have any segments space allocated to them.

Stress tests are left to the interested reader.

DML and Bloom

One of the comments on my recent posting about “Why use pl/sql bulk strategies over simple SQL” pointed out that it’s not just distributed queries that can change plans dramatically when you change from a simple select to “insert into … select …”; there’s a similar problem with queries that use Bloom filters – the filter disappears when you change from the query to the DML.

This seemed a little bizarre, so I did a quick search on MoS (using the terms “insert select Bloom Filter”) to check for known bugs and then tried to run up a quick demo. Here’s a summary of the related bugs that I found through my first simple search:

Bug 20112932 : BLOOM FILTER IS NOT CHOOSED WHEN EXECUTING INSERT SELECT STATEMENT
11.2.0.4 - Nov 2014: "not a bug".
This cites three more documents:
  Bug 13801198  BLOOM PRUNING/FILTER NOT USED IN DML STATEMENTS 
    11.2.0.3 - March 2012 - Duplicate, base bug: 18949550
    18949550: MERGE QUERY NOT USING BLOOM FILTER
    11.2.0.3 - June 2014: fixed in 12.2 (no patches yet)

  Bug 14325392  BLOOM FILTER NOT SUPPORTED IN PARTITION WISE JOIN 
    11.2.0.3 - July 2012 - fixed in 12.1 
    (but I think this is a PX filter, not a partition filter)

  Bug 17716301  BLOOM FILTER NOT USED FOR OUTER JOIN</pre>

    Aug 2014 - hidden bug note. Patches available for 11.2.0.3
    Note 1919508.1 describes the problem.

And here’s some code to demonstrate the problem – running 11.2.0.4 (with similar results on 12.1.0.2).

rem
rem     Script:         dml_bloom_bug.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          June 2016
rem

create table pt_hash (
        id,
        grp,
        small_vc,
        padding
)
nologging
pctfree 90 pctused 10
partition by hash(grp)
(
        partition p1,
        partition p2,
        partition p3,
        partition p4
)
as
with generator as (
        select  --+ materialize
                rownum id
        from dual
        connect by
                level <= 1e4
)
select
        rownum                          id,
        trunc(rownum/50)                grp,
        to_char(trunc(rownum/20))       small_vc,
        rpad('x',100)                   padding
from
        generator, generator
where
        rownum <= 1e5
;

create table t1
as
select
        rownum  id,
        rownum  n1,
        lpad(rownum,10) v1,
        rpad('x',100) padding
from
        dual
connect by
        rownum <= 4
;

create table target (
        n1      number,
        id      number
)
;

-- gather stats on t1 and pt_hash (for all columns size 1, otherwise default)

There’s nothing fancy in this code, just a hash partitioned table with 100,000 rows (and a lot of wasted space), and a “driving” table with 4 rows that I can use in a very simple join to the partitioned table. I’ve also got an empty table ready for an insert statement.

So here’s a query with its execution plan (with rowsource execution statistics) that (based on the content of the t1 table) should select from at most two of the four partitions. I’ve hinted a hash join which is where Bloom filtering can be very effective with partitioned table joins:

set serveroutput off
alter session set statistics_level = all;

select
        /*+
                leading(t1 h1)
                use_hash(h1)    no_swap_join_inputs(h1)
        */
        t1.n1,
        h1.id
from
        t1,
        pt_hash h1
where
        t1.id between 2 and 3
and     h1.grp = t1.n1
and     h1.id <= 100
;

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| Pstart| Pstop | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |         |      1 |        |  2115 (100)|       |       |      1 |00:00:00.16 |    8374 |   8367 |       |       |          |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN                  |         |      1 |      3 |  2115   (2)|       |       |      1 |00:00:00.16 |    8374 |   8367 |  2440K|  2440K|  777K (0)|
|   2 |   PART JOIN FILTER CREATE   | :BF0000 |      1 |      3 |     2   (0)|       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |      0 |       |       |          |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL        | T1      |      1 |      3 |     2   (0)|       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |      0 |       |       |          |
|   4 |   PARTITION HASH JOIN-FILTER|         |      1 |    100 |  2113   (2)|:BF0000|:BF0000|     51 |00:00:00.16 |    8372 |   8367 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL        | PT_HASH |      2 |    100 |  2113   (2)|:BF0000|:BF0000|     51 |00:00:00.16 |    8372 |   8367 |       |       |          |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- Predicates and Outline redacted

The most significant points to notice are:

• Operation 2 – Part Join Filter Created: we’ve created a Bloom filter
• Operation 4 – Partition Hash Join – Filter: we’ve used the Bloom filter, Pstart/Pstop = :BF0000
• Operations 5 – Table Access Full: starts twice, the two partitions we need

And now we use the same SQL statement but insert the result set into the holding table:

insert into target(n1, id)
select
        /*+
                ordered
                use_hash(h1)    no_swap_join_inputs(h1)
        */
        t1.id,
        h1.id
from
        t1,
        pt_hash h1
where
        t1.id between 2 and 3
and     h1.grp = t1.n1
and     h1.id <= 100
;

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| Pstart| Pstop | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | INSERT STATEMENT         |         |      1 |        |  2115 (100)|       |       |      0 |00:00:00.02 |   16698 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  LOAD TABLE CONVENTIONAL |         |      1 |        |            |       |       |      0 |00:00:00.02 |   16698 |       |       |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN              |         |      1 |      3 |  2115   (2)|       |       |      1 |00:00:00.02 |   16689 |  1969K|  1969K|  723K (0)|
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL     | T1      |      1 |      3 |     2   (0)|       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |       |       |          |
|   4 |    PARTITION HASH ALL    |         |      1 |    100 |  2113   (2)|     1 |     4 |    100 |00:00:00.02 |   16687 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL    | PT_HASH |      4 |    100 |  2113   (2)|     1 |     4 |    100 |00:00:00.02 |   16687 |       |       |          |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- Predicate and Outline sections redacted

In this case we don’t see any operation to create a Bloom filter, and operation 5 reports 4 starts, one for each partition, with the Pstart/Pstop showing 1 – 4. As a cross-check you can also see that the buffers visited has doubled and the time (though don’t trust it too much on such a small test) has increased.

To my surprise the outline information for the first plan didn’t report a Bloom filter hint (px_join_filter), but I tried adding one to the insert statement anyway – and nothing changed; however there is a “subquery pruning” mechanism that’s been available to the optimizer for a very long time now so I decided to try hinting that for both queries /*+ subquery_pruning(@sel$1 h1@sel$1 partition) */. This had no effect on the select statement, but produced the following plan for the insert:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                 | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)| Pstart| Pstop | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | INSERT STATEMENT          |         |      1 |        |  2115 (100)|       |       |      0 |00:00:00.01 |    8390 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  LOAD TABLE CONVENTIONAL  |         |      1 |        |            |       |       |      0 |00:00:00.01 |    8390 |       |       |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN               |         |      1 |      3 |  2115   (2)|       |       |      1 |00:00:00.01 |    8381 |  1969K|  1969K|  829K (0)|
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL      | T1      |      1 |      3 |     2   (0)|       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |       |       |          |
|   4 |    PARTITION HASH SUBQUERY|         |      1 |    100 |  2113   (2)|KEY(SQ)|KEY(SQ)|     51 |00:00:00.01 |    8379 |       |       |          |
|*  5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL     | PT_HASH |      2 |    100 |  2113   (2)|KEY(SQ)|KEY(SQ)|     51 |00:00:00.01 |    8377 |       |       |          |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see operation 4 now reports Partition Hash Subquery – Oracle has “pre-queried” the driving table (you can see the statement in the 10046 trace file if you enable SQL trace) to discover which partitions it will have to visit – and operation 5 starts twice with a Pstart/Pstop of KEY(SQ).

Interestingly the hint didn’t end up in the Outline section of the execution plan, so this is an example of a query which you can’t fix by capturing the SQL Plan Baseline for one statement against the text for another – though you can hack the hint into an SQL Profile or (my preference in this case, I think) an SQL Patch.

Footnote:

After publishing this note I started to browse through the comments on the article I’d linked to reference subquery pruning, and discovered that an example of this insert/select issue appeared there with a surprising workaround, which was to use the “multi-table insert” (with just a single table). At the moment, though I haven’t managed to get this working with this example.

Footnote 2:

I’ve just been reminded by email of another detail mentioned in the comments of the earlier post – this problem isn’t present for direct path (i.e. /*+ append */) inserts – and I have run a quick test on 12.1.0.2 to check that this is indeed the case (though the fix isn’t present in 11.2.0.4).  Don’t forget to check the listed Bug notes on MoS, in case there’s a back-port available for your version of Oracle.

 

Virtual Partitions

Here’s a story of (my) failure prompted by a recent OTN posting.

The OP wants to use composite partitioning based on two different date columns – the table should be partitioned by range on the first date and subpartitioned by month on the second date. Here’s the (slightly modified) table creation script he supplied:

rem
rem     Script: virtual_partition.sql
rem     Dated:  May 2016
rem

CREATE TABLE M_DTX
(
        R_ID    NUMBER(3),
        R_AMT   NUMBER(5),
        DATE1   DATE,
        DATE2   DATE,
        VC GENERATED ALWAYS AS (EXTRACT(MONTH FROM DATE2))
)
PARTITION BY RANGE (DATE1) interval (numtoyminterval(1,'MONTH'))
SUBPARTITION BY LIST (VC)
        SUBPARTITION TEMPLATE (
                SUBPARTITION M1 VALUES (1),
                SUBPARTITION M2 VALUES (2),
                SUBPARTITION M3 VALUES (3),
                SUBPARTITION M4 VALUES (4),
                SUBPARTITION M5 VALUES (5),
                SUBPARTITION M6 VALUES (6),
                SUBPARTITION M7 VALUES (7),
                SUBPARTITION M8 VALUES (8),
                SUBPARTITION M9 VALUES (9),
                SUBPARTITION M10 VALUES (10),
                SUBPARTITION M11 VALUES (11),
                SUBPARTITION M12 VALUES (12)
        )
        (
        PARTITION M_DTX_2015060100 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('2015-06-01 00:00:01', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN'))
        )
;

There’s nothing particularly exciting about this – until you get to the query requirement – the user wants to query on date1 and date2, and doesn’t know about the virtual month column, e.g. (and, I know that there should be a to_date() or ANSI equivalent here):

SELECT * FROM m_dtx WHERE date1 = trunc(sysdate) AND date2 = '01-Jun-2016';

Now, as a general rule, you don’t expect partition elimination to occur unless the partitioning column appears with a predicate that make elimination possible, so your first response to this query is that it could eliminate on date1, but can’t possibly eliminiate on vc because vc isn’t in the where clause. However it’s possible that the partitioning code might be coded to recognise that the subpartition is on a virtual column that is derived from date2, so perhaps it could generate a new predicate before optimising, for example:

date2 = '01-Jun-2016'  => vc = 6

Unfortunately, your first response is correct – the optimizer doesn’t get this clever, and doesn’t do the sub-partition elimination. Here’s the execution plan from 12.1.0.2 for the sample query, followed by the execution plan when I explicitly add the predicate vc = 6.

SQL_ID  8vk1a05uv16mb, child number 0
-------------------------------------
SELECT /*+ dynamic_sampling(0) */  * FROM m_dtx WHERE date1 =
trunc(sysdate) AND date2 = to_date('01-Jun-2016','dd-mon-yyyy')

Plan hash value: 3104206240

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation              | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT       |       |       |       |    15 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  PARTITION RANGE SINGLE|       |     1 |    57 |    15   (7)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|   2 |   PARTITION LIST ALL   |       |     1 |    57 |    15   (7)| 00:00:01 |     1 |    12 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL   | M_DTX |     1 |    57 |    15   (7)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter(("DATE2"=TO_DATE(' 2016-06-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "DATE1"=TRUNC(SYSDATE@!)))



SQL_ID  33q012bdhjrpn, child number 0
-------------------------------------
SELECT /*+ dynamic_sampling(0) */  * FROM m_dtx WHERE date1 =
trunc(sysdate) AND date2 = to_date('01-Jun-2016','dd-mon-yyyy') and vc
= 6

Plan hash value: 938710559

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation              | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT       |       |       |       |    15 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  PARTITION RANGE SINGLE|       |     1 |    57 |    15   (7)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|   2 |   PARTITION LIST SINGLE|       |     1 |    57 |    15   (7)| 00:00:01 |     6 |     6 |
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL   | M_DTX |     1 |    57 |    15   (7)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - filter(("DATE2"=TO_DATE(' 2016-06-01 00:00:00', 'syyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss') AND
              "DATE1"=TRUNC(SYSDATE@!)))

Note how the predicate vc = 6  doesn’t show up in the predicate section in either case, but the execution plan shows PARTITION LIST ALL at operation 2 when we omit the predicate and PARTITION LIST SINGE when we include it (with suitable values also appearing for Pstart and Pstop). (The cost, by the way, is the cost of scanning a whole (range)partition whether or not the optimizer expects to restrict that scan to just one sub-partition.)

So the optimizer isn’t quite clever enough (yet). BUT … the optimizer can be very clever with constraints, combining constraints with predicates and applying transitive closure to produce new predicates – so maybe we could get the optimizer to do this if we helped it a little bit. Given the table definition supplied I’m going to assume that the date2 column is supposed to be non-null, so let’s add some truthful constraints/declarations to the table definition:

alter table m_dtx modify date2 not null;
alter table m_dtx modify vc  not null;
alter table m_dtx add constraint md_ck_vc check (vc = extract(month from date2));

Alas, this didn’t make any difference to the execution plan. But it did do something surprising to my attempts to load data into the table:

insert into m_dtx (r_id, r_amt, date1, date2)
with generator as (
        select
                rownum id
        from dual
        connect by
                level <= 1e4
)
select
        mod(rownum, 1000),
        rownum,
        trunc(sysdate,'yyyy') + dbms_random.value(0,365),
        trunc(sysdate,'yyyy') + dbms_random.value(0,365)
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e4
;

insert into m_dtx (r_id, r_amt, date1, date2)
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01400: cannot insert NULL into (???)

So the array insert with the virtual column doesn’t like the NOT NULL constraint on the virtual column because vc is, presumably, still null when the constraint is checked (though there’s no problem with single row inserts with the values() clause – I wonder what happens with the PL/SQL “FORALL” clause) – so let’s remove the not null constraint on vc and see what happens.

insert into m_dtx (r_id, r_amt, date1, date2)
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-02290: check constraint (TEST_USER.MD_CK_VC) violated

Unsurprisingly, given the fact that Oracle didn’t like the not null constraint, the critical check constraint also fails. This, by the way, is odd because a check constraint should accept a row when the constraint doesn’t evaluate to FALSE, so (a) vc can’t have been evaluated at this point or the constraint would evaluate to TRUE – which is not FALSE, and (b) vc at this point can no longer be null or the constraint would evaluate to NULL – which is not FALSE: so what “value” has vc got that makes the constraint check return FALSE ?

Bottom line:

I can see some scope for an optimizer enhancement that tries to find eliminating predicates from virtual columns; and I think there’s a need for ensuring that we can safely add constraints to virtual columns – after all we might want to create an index on a virtual column and sometimes we need a NOT NULL declaration to ensure that an index-only execution path can be found. Unfortunately I have to end this blog without finding an immediate solution for the OP.

Despite this failure, though, there are cases (as I showed a couple of years ago) where the optimizer in 12c can get clever enough to recognize the connection between a queried date column and the virtual partitioning column based on that date column.

DDL logging

I was presenting at the UKOUG event in Manchester on Thursday last week (21st April 2016), and one of the sessions I attended was Carl Dudley’s presentation of some New Features in 12c. The one that caught my eye in particular was “DDL Logging” because it’s a feature that has come up fairly frequently in the past on OTN and other Oracle forums.

So today I decided to write a brief note about DDL Logging – and did a quick search of my blog to see if I had mentioned it before: and I found this note that I wrote in January last year but never got around to publishing – DDL Logging is convenient, but doesn’t do the one thing that I really want it to do:

DDL Logging – 12c

One of the little new features that should be most welcome in 12c is the ability to capture all DDL executed against the database. All it takes is a simple command (if you haven’t set the relevant parameter in the parameter file):

alter system set enable_ddl_logging = true;

All subsequent DDL will be logged to two different places (in two formats)

• $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/{database}/{instance}/log/ddl/log.xml
• $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/{database}/{instance}/log/ddl_{instance}.log

Unfortunately the one thing I really wanted to see doesn’t appear – probably because it doesn’t really count as DDL –  it’s the implicit DDL due to inserting into not-yet-existing partitions of an interval partitioned table.

Note: If you’re using a container database with pluggable databases then the DDL for all the pluggable databases goes into the same log file.

Update – Licensing

The following text in the Oracle 12c Database Licensing document has just been brought to my attention:

Licensed Parameters
The init.ora parameter ENABLE_DDL_LOGGING is licensed as part of the Database Lifecycle Management Pack when set to TRUE. When set to TRUE, the database reports schema changes in real time into the database alert log under the message group schema_ddl. The default setting is FALSE.

The licensing document is also linked to from the 12c online html page for the parameter.

The 11g parameter definition makes no mention of licensing, and the 11g “New Features” manual don’t mention the feature at all, but the parameter does get a special mention in the 11g licensing document where it is described as being part of the Change Management Pack.

init.ora Parameters
The use of the following init.ora parameter is licensed under Oracle Change Management Pack:
■ ENABLE_DDL_LOGGING: when set to TRUE (default: FALSE)

 

Wrong Results

Just in – a post on the Oracle-L mailing lists asks: “Is it a bug if a query returns one answer if you hint a full tablescan and another if you hint an indexed access path?” And my answer is, I think: “Not necessarily”:

SQL> select /*+ full(pt_range)  */ n2 from pt_range where n1 = 1 and n2 = 1;

        N2
----------
         1
SQL> select /*+ index(pt_range pt_i1) */ n2 from pt_range where n1 = 1 and n2 = 1;

        N2
----------
         1
         1

The index is NOT corrupt.

The reason why I’m not sure you should call this a bug is that it is a side effect of putting the database into an incorrect state. You might have guessed from the name that the table is a (range) partitioned table, and I’ve managed to get this effect by doing a partition exchange with the “without validation” option.

create table t1 (
        n1      number(4),
        n2      number(4)
);

insert into t1
select  rownum, rownum
from    all_objects
where   rownum <= 5
;

create table pt_range (
        n1      number(4),
        n2      number(4)
)
partition by range(n1) (
        partition p10 values less than (10),
        partition p20 values less than (20)
)
;

insert into pt_range
select
        rownum, rownum
from
        all_objects
where
        rownum <= 15
;

create index pt_i1 on pt_range(n1,n2);

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

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

alter table pt_range
exchange partition p20 with table t1
including indexes
without validation
update indexes
;

The key feature (in this case) is that the query can be answered from the index without reference to the table. When I force a full tablescan Oracle does partition elimination and looks at just one partition; when I force the indexed access path Oracle doesn’t eliminate rows that belong to the wrong partition – though technically it could (because it could identify the target partition by the partition’s data_object_id which is part of the extended rowid stored in global indexes).

Here are the two execution plans (from 11.2.0.4) – notice how the index operation has no partition elimination while the table operation prunes partitions:

select /*+ full(pt_range)  */ n2 from pt_range where n1 = 1 and n2 = 1

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation              | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT       |          |       |       |     2 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  PARTITION RANGE SINGLE|          |     1 |     6 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL    | PT_RANGE |     1 |     6 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter(("N1"=1 AND "N2"=1))


select /*+ index(pt_range pt_i1) */ n2 from pt_range where n1 = 1 and n2 = 1

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation        | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT |       |       |       |     1 (100)|          |
|*  1 |  INDEX RANGE SCAN| PT_I1 |     1 |     6 |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   1 - access("N1"=1 AND "N2"=1)

Note: If I had a query that did a table access by (global) index rowid after the index range scan it WOULD do partition elimination and visit just the one partition – never seeing the data in the wrong partition.

So is it a bug ? You told Oracle not to worry about bad data – so how can you complain if it reports bad data.

Harder question – which answer is the “right” one – the answer which shows you all the data matching the query, or the answer which shows you only the data that is in the partition it is supposed to be in ?

Partition Limit

A tweet from Connor McDonald earlier on today reminded me of a problem I managed to pre-empt a couple of years ago.

Partitioning is wonderful if done properly but it’s easy to get a little carried away and really foul things up. So company “X” decided they were going to use range/hash composite partitioning and, to minimise contention and (possibly) reduce the indexing overheads, they decided that they would create daily partitions with 1,024 subpartitions.

This, in testing, worked very well, and the idea of daily/1024 didn’t seem too extreme given the huge volume of data they were expecting to handle. There was, however, something they forgot to test; and I can demonstrate this on 12c with an interval/hash partitioned table:

rem     Script:         pt_interval_hash_2.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis

column start_date new_value m_start_date
select to_char(trunc(sysdate),'dd-mon-yyyy') start_date from dual;

create table interval_hash (
        d1      date            not null,
        n1      number(10,0)    not null,
        v1      varchar2(100)
)
tablespace test_8k_assm_2
partition by range (d1) interval (numtodsinterval(1,'DAY'))
subpartition by hash (n1) subpartitions 1024
        (
                partition p0 values less than (to_date('&m_start_date','dd-mon-yyyy'))
        )
;

insert into interval_hash values (trunc(sysdate) + 1023, 1, rpad('x',100));
insert into interval_hash values (trunc(sysdate) + 1022, 1, rpad('x',100));
insert into interval_hash values (trunc(sysdate) + 1021, 1, rpad('x',100));
commit;

I’ve started the partition range on trunc(sysdate), so it’s easy to pick a few very important future dates for insertion.

So what do you think is going to happen as I try to insert those three rows ?

insert into interval_hash values (trunc(sysdate) + 1023, 1, rpad('x',100))
            *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-14300: partitioning key maps to a partition outside maximum permitted number of partitions


insert into interval_hash values (trunc(sysdate) + 1022, 1, rpad('x',100))
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-14299: total number of partitions/subpartitions exceeds the maximum limit


1 row created.

One of them succeeds – the other two fail with DIFFERENT error messages.

The limit on the number of segments allowed for a single table (or index) is 2^20 – 1 (i.e. 1,048575); and with 1,024 hash subpartitions I’m only allowed 1,023 partitions. I think that we get two different error messages because Oracle can work out that the first subpartition that it would create for sysdate + 1023 will exceed the segment limit, but it doesn’t “realise” that it’s going to go beyond the limit with sysdate + 1022 until it’s too late and it’s started working on creating the segments.

In fact, in its attempt to create the sysdate + 1022 partition Oracle actually temporarily allocated 1GB of space (I had a 1MB uniform extent size for the tablespace) and updated various bits of the data dictionary generating a total of 13,000 redo entries and 2.3MB of redo – for a single row insert!

So – if you want 1,024 hash partitions you’re only allowed 3 years of daily partitions. If you want a longer history you need fewer hash partitions (and don’t forget to stick to a power of 2) or longer durations for each partition. If 3 years is sufficient, though, make sure you test how long it takes to drop old partitions from the start of a table that is getting close to the limit.

 

Partitioned Bitmap Join

If you don’t want to read the story, the summary for this article is:

If you create bitmap join indexes on a partitioned table and you use partition exchanges to load data into the table then make sure you create the bitmap join indexes on the loading tables in exactly the same order as you created them on the partitioned table or the exchange will fail with the (truthful not quite complete) error: ORA-14098: index mismatch for tables in ALTER TABLE EXCHANGE PARTITION.

My story starts with this OTN posting from John Hall where he found after a year of successful batch loading one of his partition exchanges was raising error 14098. After an exchange of ideas, user rp0428 came up with a query against sys.jijoin$ (one of the tables behind bitmap join indexes) that allowed John Hall to see that the indexes on the exchange table had been created in a different order from that of the partitioned table. I did a quick test to see if this might be relevant (it shouldn’t be, it isn’t with “normal” indexes or function-based indexes, or virtual columns) and didn’t manage to reproduce the problem with two dimension tables and two bitmap join indexes.

Fortunately John didn’t take my word for it and tested the idea on a clone of the production system – and found that the order of creation did matter. His system, however, had 9 dimension tables and 33 bitmap join indexes – which shouldn’t have made any difference in principle, but maybe it was something to do with having several indexes on the same table,  maybe it was something to do with have far more tables or far more indexes than I had. So I built a larger test case with 6 dimension tables and six indexes per table – and reproduced the problem.

Then I started cutting back to see where the problem appeared, and found that all it took was one dimension with two indexes, or two dimensions with one index each – whatever I had done in my “quick test” I had clearly done it too quickly and done something wrong. (Unfortunately I had overwritten most of the code from the original quick test while building the larger test, so I couldn’t go back and see where the error was.)

Here, then, is the minimal test case that I finally ran to demonstrate that switching the order of index creation on the exchange table causes the exchange to fail:

drop table pt_range purge;
drop table t1 purge;
drop table dim_1 purge;
drop table dim_2 purge;

prompt  =================
prompt  Partitioned table
prompt  =================

create table pt_range (
        id,
        grp1,
        grp2,
        padding
)
nologging
partition by range(id) (
        partition p2001 values less than (2001),
        partition p4001 values less than (4001),
        partition p6001 values less than (6001),
        partition p8001 values less than (8001)
)
as
select
        rownum                          id,
        trunc(rownum/100)               grp1,
        trunc(rownum/100)               grp2,
        rpad('x',100)                   padding
from
        all_objects
where 
        rownum <= 8000
;

prompt  ================================================
prompt  Exchange table - loaded to match partition p8001
prompt  ================================================

alter table pt_range 
add constraint pt_pk primary key (id) using index local;

create table t1 (
        id,
        grp1,
        grp2,
        padding
)
as 
select
        rownum + 6000                   id,
        trunc(rownum/100)               grp1,
        trunc(rownum/100)               grp2,
        rpad('x',100)                   padding
from
        all_objects
where 
        rownum <= 2000
;

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

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

prompt  ================
prompt  dimension tables
prompt  ================

create table dim_1 
as 
select distinct 
        grp1, 
        cast('A'||grp1 as varchar2(3)) agrp1,
        cast('B'||grp1 as varchar2(3)) bgrp1
from
        t1
;

create table dim_2 as select * from dim_1;

prompt  ===============================
prompt  Primary keys required for BMJIs
prompt  ===============================

alter table dim_1 add constraint d1_pk primary key (grp1);
alter table dim_2 add constraint d2_pk primary key (grp1);

execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'dim_1')
execute dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(user,'dim_2')

prompt  ============================
prompt  Creating bitmap join indexes
prompt  ============================

create bitmap index pt_1a on pt_range(d1.agrp1) from pt_range pt, dim_1 d1 where d1.grp1 = pt.grp1 local ;
create bitmap index pt_2a on pt_range(d2.agrp1) from pt_range pt, dim_2 d2 where d2.grp1 = pt.grp2 local ;

prompt  ====================================================
prompt  Pick your index creation order on the exchange table
prompt  ====================================================

create bitmap index t1_1a on t1(d1.agrp1) from t1, dim_1 d1 where d1.grp1 = t1.grp1 ;
create bitmap index t1_2a on t1(d2.agrp1) from t1, dim_2 d2 where d2.grp1 = t1.grp2 ;
-- create bitmap index t1_1a on t1(d1.agrp1) from t1, dim_1 d1 where d1.grp1 = t1.grp1 ;

prompt  ==================
prompt  Exchanging (maybe)
prompt  ==================

alter table pt_range
        exchange partition p8001 with table t1
        including indexes
        without validation
;

I’ve got the same create statement twice for one of the bitmap join indexes – as it stands the indexes will be created in the right order and the exchange will work; if you comment out the first t1_1a create and uncomment the second the exchange will fail. (If you comment out the ‘including indexes’ then the exchange will succeed irrespective of the order of index creation, but that rather defeats the point of being able to exchange partitions.)

I’ve reproduced the problem in 12.1.0.2, 11.2.0.4 and 10.2.0.5

Footnote

Running an extended trace didn’t help me work out how Oracle is detecting the mismatch, presumably it’s something that gets into the dictionary cache in a general “load the index definition” step; but it did show me that (in the “without validation” case) the code seems to check the correctness of the exchange table’s primary key data BEFORE checking whether the indexes match properly.

Table Expansion

I’ve often found that while I’m investigating one Oracle feature I get waylaid by noticing anomalies in other parts of the code. I was caught by one of these events a little while ago while experimenting with the new (12.1.0.2) Inmemory Columnar Store.  After reading a posting by Martin Bach I asked the question:

“If you have a partitioned table with a local index and one of the table partitions has been declared INMEMORY, would a query that could use that index be able to apply table expansion to produce a plan that did a tablescan on the in-memory partition and an indexed access path on the partitions that weren’t in-memory?”

The answer was yes, with one important caveat – the first test I built to investigate the question did something very silly and produced the wrong results. In fact the error turned out to have nothing to do with the inmemory columnar store, it also appeared when I disabled the inmemory feature off and nudged the optimizer into table expansion by making one of the index partitions unusable. Here’s the demo, followed by a few notes, if you want to test it for yourselves:

create table t1 (
        id,
        n1,
        padding
)
partition by range (id) interval (250000) (
        partition p_start values less than (250000)
        segment creation immediate
        inmemory priority critical
)
nologging
as
with generator as (
        select  --+ materialize
                rownum id 
        from dual 
        connect by 
                level <= 1e4
)
select
        rownum - 1              id,
        mod(rownum - 1,1250)    n1,             -- 200 rows per segment
        rpad('x',400,'x')       padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1e6
;

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

create index t1_i1 on t1(n1) local nologging;

I’ve created an interval-partitioned table holding a million rows with an interval of 250,000, and I’ve defined the first partition with an upper bound of 250,000 and the inmemory attribute, leaving Oracle to add the other three partitions which won’t have the inmemory attribute set.

I’ve created a local index on the n1 column, with 200 rows (1,250 distinct values) per partition. Because of the way I’ve defined n1 I can easily recreate the table to adjust the relative code of the index accessed path and the tablescan path by adjusting the value I use in the mod() function. The use of the mod() function also means that every partition holds the same volume of data (with exactly the same degree of scattering) for any specific value of n1.

To test the option for table expansion I’ve then checked the execution plan for (and run) four queries:

select
        /*+ full(t1) */
        id
from
        t1
where
        n1 = 1
and     id < 250000
;

select
        /*+ index(t1) */
        id
from
        t1
where
        n1 = 1
and     id < 250000 
;
 
select
        /*+ full(t1) */
        id 
from    t1
where   n1 = 1
and     id >= 250000
and     id <  500000
;

select
        id
from
        t1
where
        n1 = 1
;

The first two queries give me the cost of accessing the inmemory partition by tablescan compared to the cost of accessing it by index. The third query is there to demonstrate that the non-inmemory tablescan is a LOT more expensive than the inmemory one. The final query accesses all four partitions to see if the inmemory partition is treated differently from the other three. Here are the four plans:

Default tablescan when limited to the in-memory partition
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |      |   200 |  1800 |   184   (9)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   1 |  PARTITION RANGE SINGLE     |      |   200 |  1800 |   184   (9)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS INMEMORY FULL| T1   |   200 |  1800 |   184   (9)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - inmemory("N1"=1 AND "ID"<250000)
       filter("N1"=1 AND "ID"<250000)



Index access is more expensive than the inmemory tablescan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                  | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                           |       |   200 |  1800 |   201   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   1 |  PARTITION RANGE SINGLE                    |       |   200 |  1800 |   201   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
|*  2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |   200 |  1800 |   201   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1 |   200 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("ID"<250000)
   3 - access("N1"=1)



Tablescan on a non-inmemory partition is much higher than inmemory (and indexed access)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |       |   200 |  1800 |   1891  (2)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   1 | PARTITION RANGE SINGLE|       |   200 |  1800 |   1891  (2)| 00:00:01 |     2 |     2 |
|*  2 | TABLE ACCESS FULL     | T1    |   200 |  1800 |   1891  (2)| 00:00:01 |     2 |     2 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - filter("N1"=1 AND "ID">=250000 AND "ID"<500000)



Access all four partitions - no table expansion. Cost = 4 x cost of single partition indexed access path.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                  | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                           |       |   800 |  7200 |   807   (1)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   1 |  PARTITION RANGE ALL                       |       |   800 |  7200 |   807   (1)| 00:00:01 |     1 |1048575|
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |   800 |  7200 |   807   (1)| 00:00:01 |     1 |1048575|
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1 |   800 |       |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |1048575|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   3 - access("N1"=1)

So we can see that the inmemory tablescan of a single segment is cheaper than the indexed access path, and much cheaper than the tablescan of a single non-inmemory segment. When we execute the query that accesses all four segments, though, the optimizer chooses to use the same access path for all four partitions rather then splitting the query into one tablescan and three indexed accesses.

This is just a starting point for testing though – there are transformations where the optimizer will only use a particular transformation if the transformed query has a cost that is “X%” lower than it would be without the transformation (and some of these transformations have associated parameters – usually hidden – that can be set to adjust the percentage). Perhaps if I adjusted the data so that the relative benefit of a single inmemory scan was larger; or if I created a table with more partitions and had two inmemory and three not inmemory, or 3 inmemory and 4 not inmemory; or if I had more inmemory partitions than not then maybe the optimizer would spontaneously do table expansion.

Rather than fiddle about with the data my next step was to hint the final query with /*+ expand_table(t1) */. Here’s the resulting execution plan:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                    | Name    | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                             |         |       |       |  1797 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  VIEW                                        | VW_TE_1 |  1600 | 20800 |  1797   (1)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL                                  |         |       |       |            |          |       |       |
|   3 |    PARTITION RANGE SINGLE                    |         |   200 |  1800 |   184   (9)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS INMEMORY FULL               | T1      |   200 |  1800 |   184   (9)| 00:00:01 |     1 |     1 |
|   5 |    PARTITION RANGE ITERATOR                  |         |   600 |  5400 |   806   (1)| 00:00:01 |     2 |     4 |
|*  6 |     TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1      |   600 |  5400 |   806   (1)| 00:00:01 |     2 |     4 |
|*  7 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1   |   800 |       |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |     2 |     4 |
|   8 |    PARTITION RANGE INLIST                    |         |   800 | 16800 |   807   (1)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   9 |     TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1      |   800 | 16800 |   807   (1)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|* 10 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1   |   800 |       |     6   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - inmemory(("N1"=1 AND "T1"."ID"<250000))
       filter(("N1"=1 AND "T1"."ID"<250000)) 6 - filter(("T1"."ID">=250000 AND "T1"."ID"<1000000))
   7 - access("N1"=1)
  10 - access("N1"=1)

Points to notice:
Table expansion has occurred – we did an inmemory full tablescan on the inmemory partition at a cost of 184, and index range scans on the other three partitions at a cost of 805 (which looks more like the cost of visiting 4 partitions), expecting 800 rowids from the local index (a failure of partition elimination) and 600 rows from the table. The partition start/stop columns do show that the optimizer expects to visit just the three correct partitions, although some of the cost and cardinality numbers seem to be appropriate to 4 partitions.

Worse still we see a third branch to the UNION ALL / table expansion – operations 8 to 10 – which don’t report a partition start and stop. What’s that doing ? Sometimes, of course, we see sections of plan that don’t actually run – usually preceded by a FILTER operation that can evaluate to FALSE – so maybe that’s what’s happening here. Re-running the query with rowsource execution stats enabled it turned out that the PARTITION RANGE INLIST started once, and operations 9 and 10 didn’t operate at all – so that’s okay.

But what happens if I execute a query that should only access the first two partitions ? Here’s the run-time plan to answer that question:

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL_ID  5dgp982ffsph8, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select  /*+ expand_table(t1) gather_plan_statistics */         id from
       t1 where  n1 = 1 and id < 500000

Plan hash value: 2876620067

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                    | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                             |         |      1 |        |    800 |00:00:00.05 |     649 |
|   1 |  VIEW                                        | VW_TE_1 |      1 |   1200 |    800 |00:00:00.05 |     649 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL                                  |         |      1 |        |    800 |00:00:00.01 |     649 |
|   3 |    PARTITION RANGE SINGLE                    |         |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |       3 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS INMEMORY FULL               | T1      |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |       3 |
|   5 |    PARTITION RANGE SINGLE                    |         |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |     215 |
|*  6 |     TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1      |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |     215 |
|*  7 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1   |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |      15 |
|   8 |    PARTITION RANGE INLIST                    |         |      1 |    800 |    400 |00:00:00.01 |     431 |
|   9 |     TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1      |      2 |    800 |    400 |00:00:00.01 |     431 |
|* 10 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1   |      2 |    800 |    400 |00:00:00.01 |      31 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - inmemory(("N1"=1 AND "T1"."ID"<250000))
       filter(("N1"=1 AND "T1"."ID"<250000))
   6 - filter(("T1"."ID"<500000 AND "T1"."ID">=250000))
   7 - access("N1"=1)
  10 - access("N1"=1)

My query should have returned 400 rows, accessing only the first two partitions. It returned 800 rows, accessing all 4 partitions. (Notice how there are no predicates on ID for operations 9 and 10).

Since I had started my investigation with the inmemory option I assumed at this point that the problem was somehow related to the that feature; which shows how easy it is to get too focused and jump to conclusions. After raising the problem with Oracle I got a reply that the problem wasn’t about the inmemory columnar store – and here’s the next little change to test to demonstrate that point:

alter index t1_i1 indexing partial;

alter table t1 modify partition p_start indexing off;
alter table t1 modify partition p_start no inmemory;

select  partition_name, indexing, inmemory 
from    user_tab_partitions 
where   table_name = 'T1';

select  partition_name, segment_created    
from    user_ind_partitions 
where   index_name = 'T1_I1';

Enable partial indexing for the index, switch off the index on the first partition then disable the inmemory option for the partition. This is the plan I got from re-running the two-partition query:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                    | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers | Reads  |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                             |         |      1 |        |    800 |00:00:00.08 |   15370 |  14706 |
|   1 |  VIEW                                        | VW_TE_1 |      1 |   1200 |    800 |00:00:00.08 |   15370 |  14706 |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL                                  |         |      1 |        |    800 |00:00:00.07 |   15370 |  14706 |
|   3 |    PARTITION RANGE SINGLE                    |         |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |     216 |      0 |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1      |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |     216 |      0 |
|*  5 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1   |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.01 |      16 |      0 |
|   6 |    PARTITION RANGE SINGLE                    |         |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.04 |   14723 |  14706 |
|*  7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL                        | T1      |      1 |    200 |    200 |00:00:00.04 |   14723 |  14706 |
|   8 |    PARTITION RANGE INLIST                    |         |      1 |    800 |    400 |00:00:00.01 |     431 |      0 |
|   9 |     TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1      |      2 |    800 |    400 |00:00:00.01 |     431 |      0 |
|* 10 |      INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | T1_I1   |      2 |    800 |    400 |00:00:00.01 |      31 |      0 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - filter(("T1"."ID"<500000 AND "T1"."ID">=250000))
   5 - access("N1"=1)
   7 - filter(("N1"=1 AND "T1"."ID"<250000))
  10 - access("N1"=1)

Again I accessed all 4 partitions and returned 800 rows. As an odd little detail the plan reversed the order of access of partitions 1 and 2. The problem isn’t about the inmemory option, it’s a problem with generic table expansion.

Continuing Tests
I won’t go into all the details of what I did next – once you get started it’s hard to stop, and easy to lose track of what you’ve done. So here’s a quick summary.

Given the problem appeared without tthe inmemory columnar store enabled, I switched back to 11.2.0.4 (where table expansion is also possible) and emulated the problem by setting the first index partition unusable (since partial indexing is a 12c feature). Table expansion did not occur even when hinted: the plan was a full tablescan on both partitions.

So I switched the table from being interval partitioned to simple range partitioned, creating all 4 partitions as I created the data. In 11g I got table expansion and the correct answer without the extra branch to the union all; so I went back to 12c and did the same – pure range partitioning, partial indexing, and got table expansion with the correct result and no spare branches to the plan.

Tentative Conclusion

Clearly my testing is by no means exhaustive – but 12c seems to allow table expansion for interval partitioning in cases where 11g does not; unfortunately it is possible for the table expansion code to go wrong for interval partitioning in cases where simple range partitioning does not. In my case this led to wrong results.

 

Reference Script: in_memory_table_expansion_*.sql

 

 

Oops

I made a mistake a few days ago following up a question on the OTN database forum. The question was about a problem creating a hash/list composite partitioned table, and one of the respondants suggested that perhaps the problem appeared because hash/list wasn’t a legal combination.

Spot on: so I confirmed that observation and supplied a link to the official Oracle white paper that listed the combinations that were legal in 11.2 for composite partitioning.  In fact, although I was fairly sure that hash/list wasn’t legal, I had even run up a quick test to check that the attempt would fail before I’d searched online for the document.

Fortunately other people had different ideas about the original failure, and one of them supplied a link to a thread on AskTom which actually included some SQL to create a hash/list composite partitioned table. Naturally I tested it (even though it was from Tom Kyte) and obviously it worked (after all it was from Tom Kyte) – and then I spotted the syntax error in the example I had created for myself.

Trust but verify … and then …

I had fallen into two traps – and one of them was documented in my own “Trust” posting from 2006.

The white paper was dated September 2009 (Tom’s example was dated June 2013) and as it says in my Trust note:

• If its date is more than about 18 months old – don’t assume it’s (still) true
• If it’s not your exact version number – don’t assume it’s (still) true

The second trap was an example of confirmation bias, I was fairly sure that my test was supposed to fail with Oracle error “ORA-00922: missing or invalid option”, so when it failed with exactly that error I didn’t check why it had failed and didn’t notice that I had swapped the order of a couple of clauses in the create table statement. It’s very easy to think you’ve done enough when testing – especially when your test results match your expectation.

Update – later that day

So I’ve had an email asking me how I got the ORA-00922.  Here’s the SQL as I wrote it – don’t give the answer in the comments, but how quickly can you spot what I did wrong ?

create table t1
(
        object_name,
        object_type,
        created
)
partition by hash(object_name) partitions 4
subpartition by list(object_type)
subpartition template (
        subpartition sp1 values ('TABLE'),
        subpartition sp2 values ('INDEX'),
        subpartition sp3 values (default)
)
as
select  object_name, object_type, created
from    all_objects
;

It’s a deceptive error (to me, at least) because even though I know it’s wrong it still looks right.

CBO catchup

It’s interesting to watch the CBO evolving and see how an enhancement in one piece of code doesn’t necessarily echo through to all the other places it seems to fit. Here’s an example of an enhancement that spoiled (or, rather, made slightly more complicated) a little demonstration I had been running for about the last 15  years  – but (in a fashion akin to another partitioning limitation) doesn’t always work in exactly the way you might expect.

I wrote a note some time ago about the way that the optimizer could pre-compute the result of what I called a “fixed subquery” (such as “select 9100 from dual”) and take advantage of the value it derived to do a better job of estimating the cardinality for a query. That’s a neat feature (although it may cause some 3rd party applications a lot of pain as plans change on the upgrade to 11.2.0.4 or 12c) but it doesn’t work everywhere you might hope.

I’m going to create two (small) tables with the same data, but one of them is going to be a simple heap table and the other is going to be partitioned by range; then I’m going to run the same queries against the pair of them and show you the differences in execution plans. First the tables:

create table t1
as
with generator as (
        select  --+ materialize
                rownum id
        from dual
        connect by
                level <= 1e4
)
select
        rownum                  id,
        lpad(rownum,10,'0')     v1,
        rpad('x',100)           padding
from
        generator       v1
where
        rownum <= 1e4
;

create table pt1(
        id, v1, padding
)
partition by range (id) (
        partition p02000 values less than ( 2001),
        partition p04000 values less than ( 4001),
        partition p06000 values less than ( 6001),
        partition p08000 values less than ( 8001),
        partition p10000 values less than (10001)
)
as
select * from t1
;

begin
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname          => user,
                tabname          =>'PT1',
                granularity      =>'ALL',
                method_opt       => 'for all columns size 1'
        );

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

alter table  t1 add constraint  t1_pk primary key(id);
alter table pt1 add constraint pt1_pk primary key(id) using index local;

create or replace function f(i_in  number)
return number
is
begin
        return i_in;
end;
/

Note that I’ve used ‘ALL’ as my granularity option – for such small tables this should mean that the statistics at the partition and global level are as accurate as they can be. And since the data is defined to be uniform I don’t expect the partitioning to introduce any peculiarities in the optimizer’s calculations of selectivity and cardinality. I’ve created the indexes after gathering stats on the tables – this is 12c (and 11.2.0.4) so the index stats will be collected with a 100% sample as the indexes are created. Finally I’ve created a function that simply returns its numeric input.

Now let’s run a couple of queries against the simple table and check the cardinality (Rows) predicted by the optimizer – the two plans follow the code that generated them:

set serveroutput off

select  max(v1)
from    t1
where   id between (select 500 from dual)
           and     (select 599 from dual)
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

select  max(v1)
from    t1
where   id between (select f(500) from dual)
           and     (select f(599) from dual)
;

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

======================
Actual Execution Plans
======================

select max(v1) from t1 where id between (select 500 from dual)
  and     (select 599 from dual)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |       |       |     4 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                      |       |     1 |    15 |            |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |   101 |  1515 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_PK |   101 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     FAST DUAL                        |       |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |     FAST DUAL                        |       |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

select max(v1) from t1 where id between (select f(500) from dual)
     and     (select f(599) from dual)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                            | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                     |       |       |       |     3 (100)|          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                      |       |     1 |    15 |            |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED| T1    |    25 |   375 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN                  | T1_PK |    45 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   4 |     FAST DUAL                        |       |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   5 |     FAST DUAL                        |       |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

In the first plan the optimizer has recognised the values 500 and 599, so its range-based calculation has produced a (matching, and nearly correct) prediction of 101 rows. In the second plan the function call has hidden the values so the optimizer has had to use the arithmetic for “ranges with unknown values” – which means it uses guesses for the selectivity of 0.45% for the index and 0.25% for the table. Maybe in a future release that f(500) will be evaluated in the same way that we can trigger in-list calculation with the precompute_subquery hint.

Now we repeat the query, but using the partitioned table – showing only the trimmed output from dbms_xplan.display_cursor():

select max(v1) from pt1 where id between (select 500 from dual)
   and     (select 599 from dual)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                   | Name   | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                            |        |       |       |     4 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                             |        |     1 |    15 |            |          |       |       |
|   2 |   PARTITION RANGE ITERATOR                  |        |   101 |  1515 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| PT1    |   101 |  1515 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|*  4 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | PT1_PK |   101 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|   5 |      FAST DUAL                              |        |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   6 |      FAST DUAL                              |        |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - access("ID">= AND "ID"<=)

select max(v1) from pt1 where id between (select f(500) from dual)
      and     (select f(599) from dual)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                   | Name   | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                            |        |       |       |     3 (100)|          |       |       |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                             |        |     1 |    15 |            |          |       |       |
|   2 |   PARTITION RANGE ITERATOR                  |        |    25 |   375 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS BY LOCAL INDEX ROWID BATCHED| PT1    |    25 |   375 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|*  4 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN                        | PT1_PK |    45 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |   KEY |   KEY |
|   5 |      FAST DUAL                              |        |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
|   6 |      FAST DUAL                              |        |     1 |       |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |       |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
   4 - access("ID">= AND "ID"<=)

It’s great to see that the predicted cardinalities match the simple heap version exactly – but can you see anything odd about either of these plans ?

 

 

Pause for thought …

 

 

There’s nothing odd about the second plan but there’s a little puzzle in the first.

In theory, it seems, the optimizer is aware that the first query covers the range 500 – 599; so why are the pstart/pstop columns for operations 2-4 showing KEY-KEY, which usually means the optimizer knows that it will have some partition key values at run-time and will be able to do run-time partition elimination, but it doesn’t know what those key values are at parse time.

In this very simple case it’s (probably) not going to make any difference to the performance – but it may be worth some careful experimentation in more complex cases where you might have been hoping to get strict identification of partitions and partition-wise joins taking place. Yet another topic to put on the todo list of “pre-emptive investigations” with a reminder to re-run the tests from time to time.

 

 

Missing Bloom

Here’s a little surprise that came up on the OTN database forum a few days ago. Rather than describe it I’m just going to create a data set to demonstrate it, initially using 11.2.0.4 although the same thing happens on 12.1.0.2. The target is a query that joins to a range/hash composite partitioned table and uses a Bloom filter to do partition pruning at the subpartition level.  (Note to self: is it possible to see Bloom filters that operate at both the partition and subpartition level from a single join? I suspect not.). Here’s my code to create and populate both the partitioned table and a driving table for the query:

rem
rem     Script: bloom_filter_fail.sql
rem     Dated:  4th July 2015
rem
rem     Last tested
rem             12.1.0.2
rem             11.2.0.4
rem

create table pt_composite_1 (
        part_key        number(8),
        subp_key        number(8),
        small_vc        varchar2(40),
        padding         varchar2(100)
)
nologging
partition by range(part_key)
subpartition by hash (subp_key)
subpartition template (
        subpartition g1,
        subpartition g2,
        subpartition g3,
        subpartition g4
)
(
        partition p01 values less than ( 10),
        partition p02 values less than ( 20),
        partition p03 values less than ( 30),
        partition p04 values less than ( 40),
        partition p05 values less than ( 50),
        partition p06 values less than ( 60),
        partition p07 values less than ( 70),
        partition p08 values less than ( 80),
        partition p09 values less than ( 90),
        partition p10 values less than (100),
        partition p11 values less than (110),
        partition p12 values less than (120)
)
;

insert into pt_composite_1 (
        part_key, subp_key, small_vc, padding
)
select
        trunc(dbms_random.value(0,120)) part_key,
        trunc(dbms_random.value(0,50))  subp_key,
        to_char(trunc((rownum-1)/20))   small_vc,
        rpad('x',100)                   padding
from
        dual
connect by
        rownum <= 25000
;

insert /*+ append */ into pt_composite_1 select * from pt_composite_1;
commit;

insert /*+ append */ into pt_composite_1 select * from pt_composite_1;
commit;

insert /*+ append */ into pt_composite_1 select * from pt_composite_1;
commit;

insert /*+ append */ into pt_composite_1 select * from pt_composite_1;
commit;

create table driver (
        part_key        number(8),
        subp_key        number(8),
        test            number(4)
)
;

execute dbms_random.seed(0)

insert into driver
select
        trunc(dbms_random.value(0,120)) part_key,
        trunc(dbms_random.value(0,50))  subp_key,
        mod(rownum - 1, 30)
from
        dual
connect by
        level <= 60 ; begin dbms_stats.gather_table_stats( ownname => user,
                tabname         => 'driver',
                method_opt      => 'for all columns size 1'
        );
        dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
                ownname         => user,
                tabname         => 'pt_composite_1',
                method_opt      => 'for all columns size 1',
                granularity     => 'all'
        );
end;
/

So I’ve got a table with 12 partitions, each hash subpartitioned into 4 subpartitions, a total of 400,000 rows, and a driving table with 60 rows with two rows per value for column test, which probably means two separate subpartitions identified for most values of test. I set this data up to do a number of different experiments but the only result I’m going to report here is about the sub-partition key. Here’s a query that selects all the data from the partitioned table that matches the subp_key value from a subset of the driver table:

select
        ptc.part_key, ptc.subp_key, count(*), max(ptc.small_vc)
from
        pt_composite_1  ptc
where
        (ptc.subp_key) in (
                select  subp_key
                from    driver
                where   test = 0
        )
group by
        ptc.part_key, ptc.subp_key
;

The optimizer has the option to unnest the subquery and turn the query into a semi-join (specifically a right outer join), and we might hope to see a hash join with Bloom filtering being used to restrict the hash subpartitions that we visit. (We’ve (probably) picked two values for the subp_key, so we don’t expect to visit more than 2 of the hash subpartitions from each of the range partitions.) Here’s the execution plan I got, with rowsource execution statistics:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                     | Name           | Starts | E-Rows | Pstart| Pstop | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT              |                |      1 |        |       |       |    238 |00:00:01.74 |    2329 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  HASH GROUP BY                |                |      1 |    238 |       |       |    238 |00:00:01.74 |    2329 |   960K|   960K| 1377K (0)|
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN RIGHT SEMI        |                |      1 |  15997 |       |       |  15856 |00:00:01.69 |    2329 |  2440K|  2440K|  905K (0)|
|   3 |    PART JOIN FILTER CREATE    | :BF0000        |      1 |      2 |       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |      23 |       |       |          |
|*  4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL         | DRIVER         |      1 |      2 |       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |      23 |       |       |          |
|   5 |    PARTITION RANGE ALL        |                |      1 |    400K|     1 |    12 |    104K|00:00:01.04 |    2306 |       |       |          |
|   6 |     PARTITION HASH JOIN-FILTER|                |     12 |    400K|:BF0000|:BF0000|    104K|00:00:00.63 |    2306 |       |       |          |
|   7 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL        | PT_COMPOSITE_1 |     12 |    400K|     1 |    48 |    104K|00:00:00.22 |    2306 |       |       |          |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (part_keyentified by operation part_key):
---------------------------------------------------
   2 - access("PTC"."SUBP_KEY"="SUBP_KEY")
   4 - filter("TEST"=0)

Oracle has unnested the subquery and converted to a right outer semi-join using a hash join. While building the in-memory hash table it has constructed a Bloom filter at operation 3 of the plan to help it eliminate hash subpartitions, and used that Bloom filter at operation 6 of the plan. Our query does nothing to eliminate any of the range partitions so we can see operation 5 is a “partition range all”, and the application of the Bloom filter at operation 6 starts 12 times, once for each range partition. As we can see from operation 7, the Bloom filter generated by our selection from the driver table happened to identify just one subpartition – we start the TABLE (subpartition) ACCESS FULL 12 times, once for each range scan. If our driver data (and the Bloom filter) had identified 2 subpartitions we would have seen operation 7 start 24 times.

So we’ve met our first target – demonstrating that we can get a Bloom filter to eliminate at the subpartition level. Now we need to break things – the OP had a problem with a query that used Bloom filters on one system but didn’t use them for (nominally) the same setup on another system. Here’s my first attempt, with the resulting execution plan:

alter table pt_composite_1 add partition p13 values less than (130) subpartitions 8;

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                  | Name           | Starts | E-Rows | Pstart| Pstop | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT           |                |      1 |        |       |       |    238 |00:00:01.75 |    2628 |       |       |          |
|   1 |  HASH GROUP BY             |                |      1 |   3310 |       |       |    238 |00:00:01.75 |    2628 |   960K|   960K| 2529K (0)|
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN RIGHT SEMI     |                |      1 |  16000 |       |       |  15856 |00:00:01.71 |    2628 |  2440K|  2440K|  743K (0)|
|*  3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL       | DRIVER         |      1 |      2 |       |       |      2 |00:00:00.01 |      23 |       |       |          |
|   4 |    PARTITION RANGE ALL     |                |      1 |    400K|     1 |    13 |    104K|00:00:01.05 |    2605 |       |       |          |
|   5 |     PARTITION HASH SUBQUERY|                |     13 |    400K|KEY(SQ)|KEY(SQ)|    104K|00:00:00.64 |    2605 |       |       |          |
|   6 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL     | PT_COMPOSITE_1 |     13 |    400K|     1 |    56 |    104K|00:00:00.22 |    2306 |       |       |          |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ve added a new partition – with a different number of subpartitions from the table default. The Bloom filter has disappeared and the optimizer has decided to do subquery pruning instead. Drop the partition and recreate it with 2 subpartitions and the same thing happens; drop it and recreate it with 4 subpartitions and we’re back to a Bloom filter. It seems that the Bloom filter depends on every partition having the same number of subpartitions. (That’s not too surprising – the code to handle a Bloom filter when there are a variable number of subpartitions could get a little messy, and there probably aren’t many sites that use variable numbers of subpartitions.)

You might note from the Starts value for operation 5 (the subquery line) that the subquery had to run 13 times. Checking the 10046 trace file we can see the following SQL:

SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 0, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 1, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 2, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 3, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 4, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 5, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 6, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 7, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 8, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 9, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 10, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 11, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1
SELECT distinct TBL$OR$IDX$PART$NUM("PT_COMPOSITE_1", 0, 2, 12, "SUBP_KEY") FROM (SELECT "DRIVER"."SUBP_KEY" "SUBP_KEY" FROM "DRIVER" "DRIVER" WHERE "DRIVER"."TEST"=0) ORDER BY 1

This is the optimizer trying to work out, for each of the 12 partitions, which subpartitions it needs to visit. In my case this resulted in a full tablescan of the driver table for each partition. For hash subpartitions, at least, this does seem to be overkill (and can anyone say “bind variables”) – wouldn’t it be possible to run the query once for the partition with the most subpartitions and then derive the correct subpartition number for all other cases ? Maybe, but perhaps that’s just too much special-case code, or maybe it’s on the todo list. Realistically we might guess that a driver table would be very small compared to the size of the subpartitions you were eventually going to scan, so the excess extra work may be a tiny fraction of the total workload – so the added complexity might be seen as too much investment (and risk) for too little return. Maybe in a future release there will be a bit of patching to reduce this overhead.

Conclusion

You may find that some execution plans involving hash subpartitions become less efficient if you don’t keep the number of subpartitions per partition constant across the entire table. I’ve only tested with range/hash composites but there may be other variations of composite partitoning where a similar change in plans occurs.

Footnote

I haven’t done any exhaustive investigation yet, but so far I haven’t been able to create a data set, or perhaps a query, that allows the optimizer to create a Bloom filter (or two) from the driving table and then filter both the range partitions and the hash subpartitions. The closest I’ve come is a plan that shows a Bloom filter being used to filter the range partitions followed by a pruning subquery for the hash subpartitions.

Reverse Key

A question came up on the OTN database forum recently asking if you could have a partitioned index on a non-partitioned table.

(Aside: I’m not sure whether it would be quicker to read the manuals or try the experiment – either would probably be quicker than posing the question to the forum. As so often happens in these RTFM questions the OP didn’t bother to acknowledge any of the responses)

The answer to the question is yes – you can create a globally partitioned index, though if it uses range partitioning you have to specify a MAXVALUE partition. The interesting thing about the question, though is that several people tried to guess why it had been asked and then made suggestions based on the most likely guess (and wouldn’t it have been nice to see some response from the OP ). The common guess was that there was a performance problem with the high-value block of a sequence-based (or time-based) index – a frequent source of “buffer busy waits” events and other nasty side effects.

Unfortunately too many people suggesting reverse key as a solution to this “right-hand” problem. If you’re licensed for partitioning it’s almost certain that a better option would simple be to use global hash partitioning (with 2^N for some N) partitions. Using reverse keys can result in a bigger performance problem than the one you’re trying to avoid – you may end up turning a little time spent on buffer busy waits into a large amount of time spent on db file sequential reads. To demonstrate the issue I’ve created a sample script – and adjusted my buffer cache down to the appropriate scale:

rem
rem     Script:         c_reverse_ind3.sql
rem     Author:         Jonathan Lewis
rem     Dated:          Jun 2010
rem     Purpose:
rem

create table t1(
	id	not null
)
nologging
as
with generator as (
	select	--+ materialize
		rownum id 
	from dual 
	connect by 
		rownum <= 1e4
)
select
	1e7 + rownum	id
from
	generator	v1,
	generator	v2
where
	rownum <= 1e7 ; begin dbms_stats.gather_table_stats( ownname => user,
		tabname		 => 'T1'
	);
end;
/

alter table t1 add constraint t1_pk primary key(id) 
using index 
	reverse 
	nologging 
;

alter system flush buffer_cache;
alter session set events '10046 trace name context forever, level 8';

begin
	for i in 20000001..20010000 loop
		insert into t1 values(i);
	end loop;
end;
/

I’ve created a table with 10,000,000 rows using a sequential value as the primary key, then inserted “the next” 10,000 rows into the table in order. The index occupied about about 22,000 blocks, so to make my demonstration show you the type of effect you could get from a busy production system with more tables and many indexes I ran my test with the buffer cache limited to 6,000 blocks – a fair fraction of the total index size. Here’s a small section of the trace file from the test running 10.2.0.3 on an elderly machine:

WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 13238 file#=6 block#=12653 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271125590
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7360 file#=6 block#=12749 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271133150
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  5793 file#=6 block#=12844 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271139110
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  5672 file#=6 block#=12940 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271145028
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 15748 file#=5 block#=13037 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271160998
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  8080 file#=5 block#=13133 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271169314
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  8706 file#=5 block#=13228 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271178240
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7919 file#=5 block#=13325 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271186372
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 15553 file#=6 block#=13549 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271202115
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7044 file#=6 block#=13644 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271209420
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  6062 file#=6 block#=13741 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271215648
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  6067 file#=6 block#=13837 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271221887
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 11516 file#=5 block#=13932 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271234852
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  9295 file#=5 block#=14028 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271244368
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  9466 file#=5 block#=14125 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271254002
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7704 file#=5 block#=14221 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271261991
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 16319 file#=6 block#=14444 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271278492
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7416 file#=6 block#=14541 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271286129
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  5748 file#=6 block#=14637 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271292163
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7131 file#=6 block#=14732 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271299489
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 16126 file#=5 block#=14829 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271315883
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7746 file#=5 block#=14925 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271323845
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  9208 file#=5 block#=15020 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271333239
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7708 file#=5 block#=15116 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271341141
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 15484 file#=6 block#=15341 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271356807
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  5488 file#=6 block#=15437 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271362623
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 10447 file#=6 block#=15532 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271373342
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 12565 file#=6 block#=15629 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271386741
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 17168 file#=5 block#=15725 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271404135
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7542 file#=5 block#=15820 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271411882
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  9400 file#=5 block#=15917 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271421514
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7804 file#=5 block#=16013 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271429519
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 14470 file#=6 block#=16237 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271444168
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  5788 file#=6 block#=16333 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271450154
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  9630 file#=6 block#=16429 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271460008
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 10910 file#=6 block#=16525 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271471174
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 15683 file#=5 block#=16620 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271487065
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  8094 file#=5 block#=16717 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271495454
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  6670 file#=5 block#=16813 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271502293
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7852 file#=5 block#=16908 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271510360
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 10500 file#=6 block#=17133 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271521039
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 11038 file#=6 block#=17229 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271532275
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 12432 file#=6 block#=17325 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271544974
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7784 file#=6 block#=17421 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271553331
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7774 file#=5 block#=17517 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271561346
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  6583 file#=5 block#=17613 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271568146
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  7901 file#=5 block#=17708 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271576231
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  6667 file#=5 block#=17805 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271583259
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela=  9427 file#=6 block#=18029 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271592988
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 52334 file#=6 block#=18125 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271646055
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 50512 file#=6 block#=18221 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271697284
WAIT #43: nam='db file sequential read' ela= 10095 file#=6 block#=18317 blocks=1 obj#=63623 tim=3271708095

Check the block number for this list of single block reads – we’re jumping through the index about 100 blocks at a time to read the next block where an index entry has to go. The jumps are the expected (and designed) effect of reverse key indexes: the fact that the jumps turn into physical disc reads is the (possibly unexpected) side effect. Reversing an index makes adjacent values look very different (by reversing the bytes) and go to different index leaf blocks: the purpose of the exercise is to scatter concurrent similar inserts across multiple blocks, but if you scatter the index entries you need to buffer a lot more of the index to keep the most recently used values in memory. Reversing the index may eliminate buffer busy waits, but it may increase time lost of db file sequential reads dramatically.

Here’s a short list of interesting statistics from this test – this time running on 11.2.0.4 on a machine with SSDs) comparing the effects of reversing the index with those of not reversing the index – normal index first:

Normal index
------------
CPU used by this session               83
DB time                                97
db block gets                      40,732
physical reads                         51
db block changes                   40,657
redo entries                       20,174
redo size                       5,091,436
undo change vector size         1,649,648

Repeat with reverse key index
-----------------------------
CPU used by this session              115
DB time                               121
db block gets                      40,504
physical reads                     10,006
db block changes                   40,295
redo entries                       19,973
redo size                       4,974,820
undo change vector size         1,639,232

Because of the SSDs there’s little difference in timing between the two sets of data and, in fact, all the other measures of work done are very similar except for the physical reads count – and that’s the one that’s going to matter. In my test the increase in the number of physical reads is probably the cause of the extra CPU time thanks to both the LRU manipulation and the interaction with the operating system.

If you want to check the effect of index reversal you can take advantage of the sys_op_lbid() function to sample a little of your data – in my case I’ve queried the last 10,000 rows (values) in the table:

select 
	/*+ 
		cursor_sharing_exact 
		dynamic_sampling(0) 
		no_monitoring 
		no_expand 
		index_ffs(t1,t1_i1) 
		noparallel_index(t,t1_i1) 
	*/ 
	count (distinct sys_op_lbid( &m_ind_id ,'L',t1.rowid)) as leaf_blocks
from 
	t1
where 
	id between 2e7 + 1 and 2e7 + 1e4
;

The &m_ind_id substitution variable is the object_id of the index t1_i1.

In my case, with an index of 22,300 leaf blocks, my 10,000 consecutive values were scattered over 9,923 leaf blocks. If I want access to “recent data” to be as efficient as possible I need to keep that many blocks of the index cached, compared to (absolute) worst case for my data 100 leaf blocks. When you reverse key an index you have to think about how much bigger you have to make your buffer cache to keep the performance constant.

Comparisons

Catching up (still) from the Trivadis CBO days, here’s a little detail which had never crossed my mind before.

where   (col1, col2) < (const1, const2)

This isn’t a legal construct in Oracle SQL, even though it’s legal in other dialects of SQL. The logic is simple (allowing for the usual anomaly with NULL): the predicate should evaluate to true if (col1 < const1), or if (col1 = const1 and col2 < const2). The thought that popped into my mind when Markus Winand showed a slide with this predicate on it – and then pointed out that equality was the only option that Oracle allowed for multi-column operators – was that, despite not enabling the syntax, Oracle does implement the mechanism.

If you’re struggling to think where, it’s in multi-column range partitioning: (value1, value2) belongs in the partition with high value (k1, k2) if (value1 < k1) or if (value1 = k1 and value2 < k2).

Current row

Here’s a question that I’ve had on my todo (and draft posts) list for a few years – so I’m presenting it as a task for anyone who can demonstrate the answer.

If you’ve got a pl/sql cursor open and you’re using the “update current of” syntax, what happens if you update the same row twice but the row comes from a partitioned table and moves to a new partition on the first update ?

If you have a demo that you want to include in the comments then start with “sourcecode” and end with “/sourcecode” – in square brackets, without the quotation marks – to get a fixed font format and space preservation. If you have a good demonstration or reference article that you can link to, a simple URL will do nicely.#