I recently stumbled upon a curious query on a customer’s productive Oracle database:

SELECT USER FROM SYS.DUAL

Two things caught my attention:

• The query was executed many billions of times per month, accounting for about 0.3% of that system’s load. That’s 0.3% for something extremely silly!
• I don’t think that customer would ever qualify the DUAL table as SYS.DUAL, which hints at some system functionality

I found it in Oracle Enterprise Manager, but you could also find it using a query like this one:

SELECT 
  sql_id, 
  executions, 
  elapsed_time, 
  ratio_to_report(elapsed_time) over() p, 
  sql_text
FROM v$sql
ORDER BY p DESC;

Why was this query being run so often? In Enterprise Manager, the query’s statistics overview displayed that the query originated from a function called STANDARD.USER (I don’t know yet where I could find this information in the dictionary views, manually).

Naively, I had always thought that the USER pseudo column or pseudo constant is some value from the context, but like many other functions, it’s really just a function in that package.

What does STANDARD.USER() do?

Now, I’m not 100% sure if that source code is something that I am allowed to reproduce from a legal perspective, this being Oracle and all. But if you run this query here, which I am freely allowing you to:

WITH s AS (
  SELECT s.*,
    MIN(CASE 
      WHEN upper(text) LIKE '%FUNCTION USER%' 
      THEN line END
    ) OVER () s
  FROM all_source s
  WHERE owner = 'SYS' 
  AND name = 'STANDARD'
  AND type = 'PACKAGE BODY'
)
SELECT text
FROM s
WHERE line >= s AND line < s + 6;

Then you might be able to see something like this:

  function USER return varchar2 is
  c varchar2(255);
  begin
        select user into c from sys.dual;
        return c;
  end;

This is just the result of some SQL query I’ve shown you. Any correspondence with actual source code is merely coincidental.

Let’s assume this were the actual source code of the STANDARD.USER() function. We can now clearly see that this very SQL query that I’ve observed before is being executed! Want to verify this?

Let’s benchmark

As always, I’m using the benchmark technique described here. The full benchmark logic is at the end of the article.

In essence, I’m comparing the performances of 500000 executions of this loop:

FOR i IN 1 .. v_repeat LOOP
  v := USER;
END LOOP;

With this one:

FOR i IN 1 .. v_repeat LOOP
  SELECT USER INTO v FROM dual;
END LOOP;

And this one:

FOR i IN 1 .. v_repeat LOOP
  v := sys_context('USERENV', 'CURRENT_USER');
END LOOP;

The result of this benchmark is:

Run 1, Statement 1 : 2.40509 (avg : 2.43158)
Run 1, Statement 2 : 2.13208 (avg : 2.11816)
Run 1, Statement 3 : 1.01452 (avg : 1.02081)

Run 2, Statement 1 : 2.41889 (avg : 2.43158)
Run 2, Statement 2 : 2.09753 (avg : 2.11816)
Run 2, Statement 3 : 1.00203 (avg : 1.02081)

Run 3, Statement 1 : 2.45384 (avg : 2.43158)
Run 3, Statement 2 : 2.09060 (avg : 2.11816)
Run 3, Statement 3 : 1.02239 (avg : 1.02081)

Run 4, Statement 1 : 2.39516 (avg : 2.43158)
Run 4, Statement 2 : 2.14140 (avg : 2.11816)
Run 4, Statement 3 : 1.06512 (avg : 1.02081)

Run 5, Statement 1 : 2.48493 (avg : 2.43158)
Run 5, Statement 2 : 2.12922 (avg : 2.11816)
Run 5, Statement 3 : 1.00000 (avg : 1.02081)

How to read this benchmark result? These aren’t actual times, which are not interesting, but relative times compared to the fastest run (run 5, statement 3 = 1). The explicit SELECT USER FROM DUAL is about half as fast as the SYS_CONTEXT call, and the USER call is a bit slower, even.

When re-running this query:

SELECT 
  sql_id, 
  executions, 
  ratio_to_report(elapsed_time) over() p, 
  sql_text
FROM v$sql
ORDER BY p DESC;

We can see:

SQL_ID          EXECUTIONS  P     SQL_TEXT
6r9s58qfu339c   1           0.26  DECLARE ...
1v717nvrhgbn9   2500000     0.14  SELECT USER FROM SYS.DUAL
...

So, this query has definitely been run way too many times, including the PL/SQL to SQL context switch that is involved.

I’m running this benchmark in Oracle 18.0.0.0.0 in Docker on a Windows machine. More close-to-the-metal and less virtualised setups might achieve more drastic results. See, e.g. Connor McDonald got a much better improvement from using SYS_CONTEXT:

In this particular case, The STANDARD.USER() reference was used very often in triggers to fill in audit columns of many tables. Very easy to fix. Just use sys_context('USERENV', 'CURRENT_USER') instead.

Full benchmark logic

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON

ALTER SYSTEM FLUSH SHARED_POOL;
ALTER SYSTEM FLUSH BUFFER_CACHE;

CREATE TABLE results (
  run     NUMBER(2),
  stmt    NUMBER(2),
  elapsed NUMBER
);

DECLARE
  v_ts TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE;
  v_repeat CONSTANT NUMBER := 500000;
  v NUMBER;
BEGIN

  -- Repeat the whole benchmark several times to 
  -- avoid warmup penalty
  FOR r IN 1..5 LOOP
    v_ts := SYSTIMESTAMP;
      
    FOR i IN 1 .. v_repeat LOOP
      v := v + length(USER);
    END LOOP;
  
    INSERT INTO results VALUES (r, 1, 
      SYSDATE + ((SYSTIMESTAMP - v_ts) * 86400) - SYSDATE);
    v_ts := SYSTIMESTAMP;
      
    FOR i IN 1 .. v_repeat LOOP
      SELECT v + length(USER) INTO v FROM dual;
    END LOOP;
      
    INSERT INTO results VALUES (r, 2, 
      SYSDATE + ((SYSTIMESTAMP - v_ts) * 86400) - SYSDATE);
    v_ts := SYSTIMESTAMP;
      
    FOR i IN 1 .. v_repeat LOOP
      v := v + length(sys_context('USERENV', 'CURRENT_USER'));
    END LOOP;
      
    INSERT INTO results VALUES (r, 3, 
      SYSDATE + ((SYSTIMESTAMP - v_ts) * 86400) - SYSDATE);
  END LOOP;
  
  FOR rec IN (
    SELECT 
      run, stmt, 
      CAST(elapsed / MIN(elapsed) OVER() AS NUMBER(10, 5)) ratio,
      CAST(AVG(elapsed) OVER (PARTITION BY stmt) / 
           MIN(elapsed) OVER() AS NUMBER(10, 5)) avg_ratio
    FROM results
    ORDER BY run, stmt
  )
  LOOP
    dbms_output.put_line('Run ' || rec.run || 
      ', Statement ' || rec.stmt || 
      ' : ' || rec.ratio || ' (avg : ' || rec.avg_ratio || ')');
  END LOOP;
  
  dbms_output.put_line('');
  dbms_output.put_line('Copyright Data Geekery GmbH');
  dbms_output.put_line('https://www.jooq.org/benchmark');
END;
/

DROP TABLE results;