RE: Wow - has anyone used ROW_NUMBER() to get around using a UNION statement when UNION ALL doesn't work??

  • From: "Taylor, Chris David" <ChrisDavid.Taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: 'Jeremy Schneider' <jeremy.schneider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "'mwf@xxxxxxxx'" <mwf@xxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 08:15:11 -0500

Jeremy,

Thank you for clarifying the issues.  I'm going to put together all the 
information in once place and send this back out.  Then, I'd be interested in 
hearing your analysis. 

Thanks,

Chris Taylor
Sr. Oracle DBA
Ingram Barge Company
Nashville, TN 37205
Office: 615-517-3355
Cell: 615-663-1673
Email: chris.taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and 
may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the 
sender immediately and delete the contents of this message without disclosing 
the contents to anyone, using them for any purpose, or storing or copying the 
information on any medium.


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Schneider [mailto:jeremy.schneider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 5:19 PM
To: mwf@xxxxxxxx
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Taylor, Chris David
Subject: Re: Wow - has anyone used ROW_NUMBER() to get around using a UNION 
statement when UNION ALL doesn't work??

On 8/8/2011 11:27 AM, Mark W. Farnham wrote:
> In the event that you know a subset of the columns of a UNION ALL 
> projection such that ordering by the column subset guarantees that 
> duplicates appear together, then you can generate that special case of 
> UNION ALL to UNION de-duplication at a lower cost. Chris has related 
> one such mechanism, using the ROW_NUMBER() analytical function. It may 
> have been unclear that he was relying on a subset of the columns of 
> the projection. If he needed all the columns for the grouping, his 
> mechanism would be at best a tie (and I write that in the sense that 
> the best you can do in any transfer of energy is have zero increase in 
> entropy, except you really can only break even in the math and in 
> reality you always lose.)

I think that in his original email, Chris said he included all the columns in 
the "partition by" clause.


On 8/5/2011 1:35 PM, Taylor, Chris David wrote:
> Now, I put the query containing the UNION ALL in an INNER select, and 
> I select all columns from it PLUS the ROW_NUMBER() function 
> partitioning by all the columns and applying an order by to the 
> function and call this column "ROW_KEY" (not very original I know).


Which is why there are so many questions about this. As Mark has pointed out, 
if you're partitioning on all the columns then you're doing exactly the same 
sort that's the UNION is doing. Something just isn't quite right about the 
results; both methods should be doing nearly the identical work.

Or to put it another way, if manually sorting all the records and removing dups 
addes 0 seconds and 0 TEMP tablespace to the subquery without the ROW_NUMBER() 
analytic clause, then either the sort is not really happening (the fastest way 
to do anything) or there's something wrong with the UNION which ought to be 
running in the same amount of time and resources. At least this is how it seems 
to me, and might be the reason there are so many questions.

-Jeremy

--
http://www.ardentperf.com
+1 312-725-9249

Jeremy Schneider
Chicago



--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


Other related posts: