Does "TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID" means optimizer using index or table?

Question

I have query that join two very big tables and ran explain plan on that it showing like this..



      ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        | Id  | Operation                        | Name                        | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
        ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        |   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                 |                             |     1 |    31 |     7   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        |   1 |  PX COORDINATOR                  |                             |       |       |            |          |
        |   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM)            | :TQ10000                    |       |       |            |          |
        |   3 |    NESTED LOOPS                  |                             |       |       |            |          |
        |   4 |     NESTED LOOPS                 |                             |     1 |    31 |     7   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        |   5 |      PX PARTITION HASH ALL       |                             |     1 |    17 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        |   6 |       TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| Tab1                        |     1 |    17 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        |*  7 |        INDEX RANGE SCAN          | Tab1_PK                     |     1 |       |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        |*  8 |      INDEX UNIQUE SCAN           | tab2_PK                     |     1 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        |*  9 |     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID  | Tab2                        |     1 |    14 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
        ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Query:

select t2.colC,t2,colD,t1.colX
from tab2 t2
join tab1 t1 on t2.colA=t1.colA
and t1.colB=2345
and t2.colC in (123,456,789);

Does TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID mean Optimizer is accessing rowid in Index or scanning table to get the rowids?

Currently Query is finishing in few secs. But in the plan says its not using any index, both tables has appropriate indexes.

Answer 1

TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID means that the Oracle kernel is going through your index and knows that not all needed information is contained in the index (columns needed are not in this index). Therefore it takes the pointer to the actual table data (rowid) and looks it up.

Popular trick to make things run faster is in this case including missing columns in the (non unique) index. It avoids one lookup in the table at the expense of larger indexes.

Answer 2

TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID - we should know two things about it

1. The rowid of a row specifies the data file and data block containing the row and the location of the row in that block. Locating a row by specifying its rowid is the fastest way to retrieve a single row because it specifies the exact location of the row in the database.

2. Searching the index is a fast and an efficient operation for Oracle and when Oracle finds the desired value it is looking for, it can also find out the rowid of the record in some other table. Oracle can then use this rowid to fetch further information if requested in query