Carlos Sierra's Tools and Tips

I recently saw a post with this title “Oracle Queries are taking different Plans” and since there was a lot of guessing I suggested to use SQLTXPLAIN and find there the root cause. For some reason or another the thread is still open after 20 days, and the guessing continues. Since the problem of “finding the root cause of a change on an execution plan” is old and still common, I decided to talk about it here.

In Oracle, execution plans do change for one SQL over time, that is a fundamental function of the Cost-based Optimizer (CBO). Not only is normal, but expected and desired in most circumstances. What is not desired, is when a SQL that had a good performing plan suddenly changes its plan to one that we consider sub-optimal in terms of performance. This should be the concern and focus. So WHY the CBO suddenly generates such a plan? The possible reasons are many but I enlist here the most common ones I can think of:

• Schema object statistics changes
• Small sample sizes when gathering CBO schema statistics (mostly on 10g)
• Lack of statistics in some columns referenced by predicates
• Inconsistent values of bind variables referenced by SQL
• System wide changes like CBO parameters or system statistics
• Index modifications including new and dropped indexes
• Invalid or invisible indexes
• Large SQL text with many predicates where several plans with similar cost are possible
• Inconsistent ramp-up process of Adaptive Cursor Sharing (ACS)
• SQL Profiles generated by the SQL Tuning Advisor (STA)
• An index changing its blevel (for example from blevel 2 to 3)
• Volatile values in some columns (for example value “Pending” exists in table column for a short time)
• Asynchronous gathering of stats on volatile data instead of gathering right between load and consumption

The list above is not comprehensive. It only includes what came to my mind while writing it, so I may have forgotten several cases. And of course there are always some corner cases like special conditions activating uncommon heuristics, or simply hitting a CBO bug.

Guessing WHY a plan has changed is very time consuming and requires multiple queries to the metadata on the database. Since most of the metadata we are interested on is dynamic by nature, we base our guess work on an ever changing environment. Of course the root cause become elusive and we may give up for some time, or jump to false conclusions.

This is where SQLTXPLAIN (MOS 215187.1) or its younger and lighter sister SQLHC (MOS 1366133.1) come to the rescue. These free tools, specially SQLTXPLAIN (SQLT), capture the static and dynamic environment around the one SQL we want to analyze.

By having a consistent view of all elements affecting the execution plan, it becomes much easier to find the root cause of a plan change. And since SQLT also includes current and past details about parameters, statistics and bind variable values, we can even correlate those values to prior execution plans. So I encourage you to try SQLTXPLAIN on a SQL next time you are confronted by the old question: “WHY Oracle Queries are taking different Plans?”.

I am aware SQLTXPLAIN is intimidating. Its output is exuberant, but the point is that it includes what we need to find the root cause of most if not all SQL Tuning cases where a plan has changed.

I have presented this SQLT tool in several conferences during the past year or so. I think it is appropriate now to put together a 3 days workshop to master this tool… Just an idea at this time.