As for space consumption of histograms, it's usually low, until you have lots of partitions/subpartitions, and a good number of columns on which you compute histograms. At a client site, someone used to compute histograms on a table that had around 70 columns, with several thousands of partitions. The system tablespace was around 10G (with the histogram table taking much of it). rgds On 11/20/06, Wolfgang Breitling <breitliw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 10:49 AM 11/19/2006, A Joshi wrote: >Hi, > About use of histograms : I think histograms are useful for > indexes on columns that are not very selective. Histograms have nothing to do with indexes. A histogram can be useful to the CBO (the RBO does not use histogram information) if (a) the column is used in a predicate (b) the distribution of column values differs significantly from uniform which the CBO assumes in the absence of a histogram to "prove" the point that histograms have nothing to do with indexing I have an example where a histogram on a non-indexed column reduces cpu time and elapsed time of a query by by 50% and 40% respectively, i.e. the sql runs almost twice as fast with the histogram and consumes half as much cpu compared to without the histogram. >However I came across note 1031826.6 on metalink. About maintenance >and space cost. I think space cost is negligible and can be ignored. >About maintenance : does it mean statistics need to be gather often? >Or does it mean some other cost. > >Question : Is there any other overhead or any other negative impact >of using histograms? Yes > >Is it advisable to use histograms just for some tables and some >specific columns or is it OK to just set database wide? No. At least in my opinion. I have seen an unnecessary histogram - on a column with perfectly uniform data distribution - destroy ( and I mean destroy, by a factor of ~ 9000 ) the performance of a sql statement. See also the recent post by Fuad Arshad and I quote: "it is generating histograms which doesnt work well with the application". Regards Wolfgang Breitling Centrex Consulting Corporation www.centrexcc.com ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l