ba6.us - Dave's Database Related Stuff

I recently had an issue where a query being submitted to the database had a large change in performance. I could attribute the change to a recent change in object statistics, but the query wasn't behaving because of a combination of a view, subquery, UNION, and LIKE operators. After spending too much time on this statement I decided to hint it to make it perform like it did before the most recent stats change.

As I get deeper into tuning with Statistics and the CBO I have been paying a lot more attention to hints. In the past I always tried to avoid hints. After working with the CBO and staistics in recent versions I believe they are necessary at times to give guidance to the CBO. The Oracle Database SQL Language Reference has a comprehensive list of hints included in the documentation of SQL Comments. The list for 11g is available here: link.