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 … Continue reading Beware of Hidden PL/SQL to SQL Context Switches
Tag: tuning
NOT IN vs. NOT EXISTS vs. LEFT JOIN / IS NULL: MySQL
When you're spoiled with Oracle's fabulous query transformation capabilities and its really well-done cost-based optimiser, then you might forget how difficult SQL query tuning used to be in the "old days" or with those less sophisticated databases. Here's a really nice explanation of the various means of implementing an ANTI-JOIN in MySQL: http://explainextended.com/2009/09/18/not-in-vs-not-exists-vs-left-join-is-null-mysql/