How to inline a variable in PL/SQL?

Question

The Situation

I have some trouble with my query execution plan for a medium-sized query over a large amount of data in Oracle 11.2.0.2.0. In order to speed things up, I introduced a range filter that does roughly something like this:

PROCEDURE DO_STUFF(
    org_from VARCHAR2 := NULL,
    org_to   VARCHAR2 := NULL)

  -- [...]
  JOIN organisations org
    ON (cust.org_id = org.id
   AND ((org_from IS NULL) OR (org_from <= org.no))
   AND ((org_to   IS NULL) OR (org_to   >= org.no)))
  -- [...]

As you can see, I want to restrict the JOIN of organisations using an optional range of organisation numbers. Client code can call DO_STUFF with (supposed to be fast) or without (very slow) the restriction.

The Trouble

The trouble is, PL/SQL will create bind variables for the above org_from and org_to parameters, which is what I would expect in most cases:

  -- [...]
  JOIN organisations org
    ON (cust.org_id = org.id
   AND ((:B1 IS NULL) OR (:B1 <= org.no))
   AND ((:B2 IS NULL) OR (:B2 >= org.no)))
  -- [...]

The Workaround

Only in this case, I measured the query execution plan to be a lot better when I just inline the values, i.e. when the query executed by Oracle is actually something like

  -- [...]
  JOIN organisations org
    ON (cust.org_id = org.id
   AND ((10 IS NULL) OR (10 <= org.no))
   AND ((20 IS NULL) OR (20 >= org.no)))
  -- [...]

By "a lot", I mean 5-10x faster. Note that the query is executed very rarely, i.e. once a month. So I don't need to cache the execution plan.

My questions

• How can I inline values in PL/SQL? I know about EXECUTE IMMEDIATE, but I would prefer to have PL/SQL compile my query, and not do string concatenation.

• Did I just measure something that happened by coincidence or can I assume that inlining variables is indeed better (in this case)? The reason why I ask is because I think that bind variables force Oracle to devise a general execution plan, whereas inlined values would allow for analysing very specific column and index statistics. So I can imagine that this is not just a coincidence.

• Am I missing something? Maybe there is an entirely other way to achieve query execution plan improvement, other than variable inlining (note I have tried quite a few hints as well but I'm not an expert on that field)?

Answer 1

In one of your comments you said:

"Also I checked various bind values. With bind variables I get some FULL TABLE SCANS, whereas with hard-coded values, the plan looks a lot better."

There are two paths. If you pass in NULL for the parameters then you are selecting all records. Under those circumstances a Full Table Scan is the most efficient way of retrieving data. If you pass in values then indexed reads may be more efficient, because you're only selecting a small subset of the information.

When you formulate the query using bind variables the optimizer has to take a decision: should it presume that most of the time you'll pass in values or that you'll pass in nulls? Difficult. So look at it another way: is it more inefficient to do a full table scan when you only need to select a sub-set of records, or to do indexed reads when you need to select all records?

It seems as though the optimizer has plumped for full table scans as being the least inefficient operation to cover all eventualities.

Whereas when you hard code the values the Optimizer knows immediately that 10 IS NULL evaluates to FALSE, and so it can weigh the merits of using indexed reads for find the desired sub-set records.

---

So, what to do? As you say this query is only run once a month I think it would only require a small change to business processes to have separate queries: one for all organisations and one for a sub-set of organisations.

---

"Btw, removing the :R1 IS NULL clause doesn't change the execution plan much, which leaves me with the other side of the OR condition, :R1 <= org.no where NULL wouldn't make sense anyway, as org.no is NOT NULL"

Okay, so the thing is you have a pair of bind variables which specify a range. Depending on the distribution of values, different ranges might suit different execution plans. That is, this range would (probably) suit an indexed range scan...

WHERE org.id BETWEEN 10 AND 11

...whereas this is likely to be more fitted to a full table scan...

WHERE org.id BETWEEN 10 AND 1199999

That is where Bind Variable Peeking comes into play.

(depending on distribution of values, of course).

Answer 2

Since the query plans are actually consistently different, that implies that the optimizer's cardinality estimates are off for some reason. Can you confirm from the query plans that the optimizer expects the conditions to be insufficiently selective when bind variables are used? Since you're using 11.2, Oracle should be using adaptive cursor sharing so it shouldn't be a bind variable peeking issue (assuming you are calling the version with bind variables many times with different NO values in your testing.

Are the cardinality estimates on the good plan actually correct? I know you said that the statistics on the NO column are accurate but I would be suspicious of a stray histogram that may not be updated by your regular statistics gathering process, for example.

You could always use a hint in the query to force a particular index to be used (though using a stored outline or optimizer plan stability would be preferable from a long-term maintenance perspective). Any of those options would be preferable to resorting to dynamic SQL.

One additional test to try, however, would be to replace the SQL 99 join syntax with Oracle's old syntax, i.e.

SELECT <<something>>
  FROM <<some other table>> cust,
       organization org
 WHERE cust.org_id = org.id
   AND (    ((org_from IS NULL) OR (org_from <= org.no)) 
        AND ((org_to   IS NULL) OR (org_to   >= org.no)))

That obviously shouldn't change anything, but there have been parser issues with the SQL 99 syntax so that's something to check.