Database assisted denormalization – Oracle edition
time to read 7 min | 1297 words

I decided to take a chance (installing Oracle is a big leap :-) ) and see how things match in Oracle.

I decided to run the following query:

SELECT deptno, 
       dname, 
       loc, 
       (SELECT COUNT(*) 
        FROM   emp 
        WHERE  emp.deptno = dept.deptno) AS empcount 
FROM   dept 
WHERE  deptno = 20

Please note that I run in on a database that had (total) maybe a 100 records, so the results may be skewed.

image

Like in the SQL Server case, we need to create an index on the FK column. I did so, after which I got:

image

Then I dropped that index and create a simple view:

CREATE VIEW depswithempcount 
AS 
  SELECT deptno, 
         dname, 
         loc, 
         (SELECT COUNT(*) 
          FROM   emp 
          WHERE  emp.deptno = dept.deptno) AS empcount 
  FROM   dept

Querying on top of that gives me the same query plan as before. Trying to create a materialized view out of this fails, because of the subquery expression, I’ll have to express the view in terms of joins, instead. Like this:

SELECT dept.deptno, 
       dname, 
       loc, 
       COUNT(*) empcount 
FROM   dept 
       LEFT JOIN emp 
         ON dept.deptno = emp.deptno 
WHERE  dept.deptno = 20 
GROUP  BY dept.deptno, 
          dname, 
          loc

Interestingly enough, this is a different query plan than the subquery, with SQL Server, those two query exhibit identical query plans.

image

Now, to turn that into an materialized view.

CREATE materialized VIEW deptwithempcount 
AS SELECT dept.deptno, 
          dname, 
          loc, 
          COUNT(*) empcount 
   FROM   dept 
          left join emp 
            ON dept.deptno = emp.deptno 
   GROUP  BY dept.deptno, 
             dname, 
             loc

And querying on this gives us very interesting results:

select * from deptwithempcount 
where deptno = 20

image

Unlike SQL Server, we can see that Oracle is reading everything from the view. But let us try one more thing, before we conclude this with a victory.

update emp 
set deptno = 10
where deptno = 20;

select * from deptwithempcount 
where deptno = 20

But now, when we re-run the materialized view query, we see the results as they were at the creation of the view.

There appears to be a set of options to control that, but the one that I want (RERESH FAST), which update the view as soon as data changes will not work with this query, since it consider it too complex. I didn’t investigate too deeply, but it seems that this is another dead end.

Tweet Share Share 11 comments
Tags: