Global temporary tables (or private temporary tables, if you use Oracle 18c) are a practical feature to be used for SQL queries with multiple steps, for example complex reports in a data warehouse. If you want to use them, some details must be considered.
Complex SQL statements are hard to understand – not only for us, but for the query optimizer, too. Sometimes, it is a good idea to write a simpler SQL query to do the same work. Here a nice story about a performance improvement by rewriting the SQL statement.
Direct-Path INSERT is a very efficient way to load data into data warehouse tables. The load performance can even be improved with NOLOGGING on the target table. In Oracle 12c Release 2, this is even possible for Oracle Data Guard environments. But is it a good idea?
Incremental statistics reduce the time to gather global statistics for a partitioned table. Really? In some situations it may happen that incremental statistics slow down statistics calculation dramatically. An example of a real project in Oracle 12.1 and how it can be improved with Oracle 12.2.
This year, I had the opportunity to present three sessions at the DOAG conference in Nuremberg – one on each conference day. Here a short summary of the sessions and links to the downloads.
Hash keys are often used as primary keys in Data Vault environments. When loading dimensional data marts from a Data Vault schema, it seems to be obvious to use them as dimension keys, too. At least in combination with Oracle Database In-Memory, this is not a good idea.
Analytic Views, in combination with Attribute Dimensions and Hierarchies, are very useful for ad-hoc queries in a Star Schema. But how about the performance of this Oracle 12.2 feature? I wanted to know it and analyzed the execution plans of some simple queries.
