Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Hey Mates,

Would discuss a scenario that i faced some time back with one of the customer where one of the query (Part of Monthly application maintenance) started taking huge amount of time to complete.
During the analysis I’ve found it doing some extremely expensive Full Table Scans on a fat table when it shouldn’t. Let me elaborate what was the issue.

After reading the execution plan and the extended traces of Optimizer (10053) to understand the decisions made by the CBO.

Traces gave me a hint that the optimizer was able to accurately estimate the cardinality for all of the predicates as long as string is 32 bytes or less. But at one of the operation step in execution plan the estimations were wrong and crooked. I saw the CBO decided to ‘Return each of the row’ irrespective of strings and it was actually happening because the histogram contains only the first 32 characters of the string data.

So the histogram was considering only first 32 characters of the column value and the optimizer this particular value i.e “siebelm01-vip@2002:101:11f::101:1” is happening 5776 times in the table. So it ignored the index and used full table scan. Oracle will only consider the first 32 characters in the column in generating histograms and in such cases what we faced as a aftermath, the optimizer will make wrong decisions.

So as a immediate solution to the problem I’ve deleted the histogram on this specific column and this plan fixed this query plan change issue.

BEGIN
dbms_stats.delete_column_stats(ownname=>'SIEBELADMIN', tabname=>'TX2121', colname=>'C131HJA12', col_stat_type=>'HISTOGRAM');
END;
/

Other fixes:
– In case of longer strings (32 or more) in case of text search use Oracle Text or CONTAINS operator in SQL logic.

Hope That Helps!
Prashant Dixit