I have seen a few cases where the better plan generated by the CBO made quite a difference in the aggregated data from Statspack, however this was with a client application with very bad, actually no connection management at all (reconnecting over and over again).

Thank you for the suggestion. The “Disable RULE Hint” option does not appear in the 10.2.0.1 or 10.2.0.2 Oracle client, but I do see that it is found in the 10.2.0.5 Oracle client. It would be interesting to see if this checkbox made a difference in the performance of this SQL statement (the execution plan does change, but both plans are currently completing in 0.01 or fewer seconds). I wonder if this SQL statement would simply disappear if the “Disable SQLDescribeParam” option were set for the ODBC connection?

Thank you for the idea – I can just say, “That slide speaks for itself, no point in discussing it now. Click the smiley and the darn computer will not stop talking.”

—

That made be think of a related topic. In the U. S. there is a TV trivia show named “Jeopardy!”, where the answers to the questions (edit, a couple of missing words added: are provided by the TV host) and the contestants must provide the correct questions for the supplied answers (I do not regularly watch the show). Not long ago two previous winners of the show were pitted against an IBM super computer, and the super computer won. I now wonder if this was a fair competition, after all how long does it take a computer to print out:

SELECT EVERYTHING FROM ENCYCLOPEDIA WHERE SHOW='JEOPARDY';

I have not yet watched the episode where the IBM super computer dominates the unsuspecting humans, but it appears that part of the show is on YouTube:

In my presentations it’s always a good idea to skip all the pages with odd numbers – or the even numbers; it does not matter…