There are a couple of articles of mine on www.dbazine.com/oracle.shtml which may explain why Oracle chooses the tablescan for "billy%" Note, though, that based on the "billy" value, Oracle is reporting the right cardinality, and doing the right thing. Oracle is doing the slow path when it gets the right answer for the cardinality. Before you move to hinting, have you examined system statistics. If you can calibrate the system so that it has a realistic single-block read time compared to multiblock read time, the paths may correct themselves automatically. You also need to get the apparent CPU speed into the system, so that Oracle can check the CPU cost of scanning all those rows. However - before you get to that - are you sure that the sample query is correct. Oracle defaults to using a RANGE scan on TAB1_PK according to the plan, but there appear to be no columns it could be using to avoid a FULL scan. Is it possible that there is some other predicate on TAB1 that is causing the problem (it seems to be returning only 2250 rows out of 16M in the default plan) or are the statistics on the TAB1 index totally misleading ? (I have no comment to make on TAB2 and the other table at the moment). Regards Jonathan Lewis http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html April 2004 Iceland June 2004 UK - Optimising Oracle Seminar ----- Original Message ----- From: <ryan.gaffuri@xxxxxxx> To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 3:36 PM Subject: Re: Re: cardinality in query plans? : yes billy in this case uses a large fraction of the results. 262,000 records out of 870,000. I really would prefer not to hint. I do not have production data yet, so big and small in production may not be the same. however, we are currently in acceptance testing so when the client sees the query we must not have a problem. : : is there anyway to provide oracle with better information? The odd thing was that in the past on a different data set, I had to remove bind variables to make this same query work. This is troubling. : : I'll attempt to analyze the 10053 trace and I have a TAR open. : : Why would Oracle cost a full table scan lower than an index search even in spite of the large number of records? I can clearly tell with runstats_pkg that the index scan is better. : : Here is another oddity. If I use hard coded values. I then ONLY hint the index, oracle uses the index, but the incorrect join order. This is happening in a join between TAB2 and another table also. : : I am fearful of hints since I cannot predict what the data will look like in production. I may not see the production data at all due to security reasons(not government, its private sector), yet I have to guarantee performance. Per our SLA this has to support 30,000 concurrent users. Now trimming off 9,000 LIOs on a frequently used query is very important to scaling this application. : ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------