written by Victor Varlamov, OCP at 07-JUL-2017

There is a Reporting system, where a lot (more than 100) of complex long running queries are launched by Reporting Engine, triggered by different business events. Queries are executed with quite different input parameters (list of customers) and data ranges (daily, weekly, monthly). Because of skewed data in tables, one report can return anywhere from 1 row to 1 million rows depending on the input parameters of the report (different clients have different quantities of rows in fact tables). Every report is implemented as a PL/SQL package with a main function that accepts input parameters, prepares some additional data, and then opens a static cursor with PL/SQL variables as parameters, and finally returns the opened cursor. The CURSOR_SHARING parameter is set to FORCE in the DB server. In such scenarios, SQL can lead to poor performance if the optimizer re-uses unsuitable execution plans that otherwise would not be used if a hard parse was forced using literals. Bind variable peeking can cause a suboptimal plan.

In the book Expert Oracle Practices, Alex Gorbachev relates a story — told to him by Tom Kyte — in which the query plan would change on Monday mornings if it was raining. It’s a true story.

“According to the end-users’ observations, if it was raining heavily Monday morning, then database performance was terrible. Any other day of the week, or on Mondays without rain, there were no problems. Talking to the DBA responsible for the system, Tom found that the performance problems continued until the DBA restarted the database, at which point performance went back to normal. That was the workaround: Rainy Mondays = Reboots.”

It is a real case, and this case was solved without any mysteries and magic, just good knowledge of how to Oracle DB works. I’ll show the solution at the end of the article.

Here is a simple example of how bind variable peeking works: