Native Full Outer Join Officially Available in 10.2.0.5

Today I installed for the first time the patchset 10.2.0.5. While reading the README file, I noticed the following piece of information.

To enable a new native full outer join implementation in the database, a user has to set the following underscore parameter:

_optimizer_native_full_outer_join =force

You can set this parameter for the system or for a specific session.

Besides dramatically improving the performance of a full outer join, the new implementation fixes a variety of issues, for examples a variety of ORA-942 (table or view doesn’t exists) and ORA-4331 (unable to allocate string bytes of shared memory) errors.

This issue is tracked with Oracle bug 6322672.

Great! At last we can officially take advantage of native full outer join also in 10.2 (the feature was officially introduced in 11.1, but was already “available” in 10.2.0.3).

Here is an example:

• By default native full outer joins are disabled (notice the implementation with the UNION ALL operation):

SQL> SELECT * FROM emp FULL OUTER JOIN dept USING (deptno);

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 2291915024

---------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation            | Name         |
---------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |              |
|   1 |  VIEW                |              |
|   2 |   UNION-ALL          |              |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN OUTER   |              |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP          |
|   5 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| DEPT         |
|   6 |    NESTED LOOPS ANTI |              |
|   7 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL| DEPT         |
|*  8 |     INDEX RANGE SCAN | EMP_DEPTNO_I |
---------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   3 - access("EMP"."DEPTNO"="DEPT"."DEPTNO"(+))
   8 - access("EMP"."DEPTNO"="DEPT"."DEPTNO")

• As suggested by the README file, the feature can be enabled at the session level:

SQL> ALTER SESSION SET "_optimizer_native_full_outer_join" = force;

SQL> SELECT * FROM emp FULL OUTER JOIN dept USING (deptno);

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 51889263

------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name     |
------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |          |
|   1 |  VIEW                 | VW_FOJ_0 |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN FULL OUTER|          |
|   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL  | DEPT     |
|   4 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL  | EMP      |
------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   2 - access("EMP"."DEPTNO"="DEPT"."DEPTNO")