During the Xmas holidays I made several additions to SQLd360 I had on my TODO list for quite a while, I’ll try to blog about the most important ones in the coming days.

Something I wanted to do for a long time was to make understanding execution plan easier, I hope the tree representation introduced here achieved such goal.

SQLd360 v1601 takes this chart a step further, marking nodes with different colors depending on how often such execution plan step shows up in ASH. Basically depending on “how hot” (the temperature) each step is a color between yellow and red is used to color the node, making it easier to determine in which section of the plan you should put your attention.
All those steps that never show up in ASH are represented in white.

So in example a silly SQL like the following takes 21 secs in my database

select count(*) 
  from (select rownum n1 from dual connect by rownum <= 10000),   
       (select rownum n1 from dual connect by rownum <= 100000)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                         | Name | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)|
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                  |      |        |     4 (100)|
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                   |      |      1 |            |
|   2 |   MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN            |      |      1 |     4   (0)|
|   3 |    VIEW                           |      |      1 |     2   (0)|
|   4 |     COUNT                         |      |        |            |
|   5 |      CONNECT BY WITHOUT FILTERING |      |        |            |
|   6 |       FAST DUAL                   |      |      1 |     2   (0)|
|   7 |    BUFFER SORT                    |      |      1 |     4   (0)|
|   8 |     VIEW                          |      |      1 |     2   (0)|
|   9 |      COUNT                        |      |        |            |
|  10 |       CONNECT BY WITHOUT FILTERING|      |        |            |
|  11 |        FAST DUAL                  |      |      1 |     2   (0)|
------------------------------------------------------------------------

18 ASH samples captured the execution on the BUFFER SORT step and 3 samples captured the SORT AGGREGATE.

The execution plan tree temperature looks like this

Hopefully this will make it easier for people who don’t look into execution plans all the day to quickly spot where they should focus their attention 😀