Explain Plan Hangs. DBA on 3 week holiday, and his name is Murphy!

I have a query which did nothing over the entire weekend. When I try to see what it is doing the explain plan hangs. So now I understand (I think) why the query does nothing - oracle doesn't even manage to get past the query optimizer or whatever it is that does the query plans.

No errors or anything, it just sits there for days...

Oracle 8.0.5.0.0 running on NT4 sp3.

Removing a single column from the results set changes everything. Though this column is in a table from which other columns are already returned, so it is difficult to understand why it should change the explain plan!!! For example (this is an example the full sql is a bit bigger):

select sum(trans_amt),account_code,rcpt.short_dsc,rcpt.region from glm ,rcpt
where glm.rcpt_code = rcpt.rcpt_code
group by
account_code,rcpt.short_dsc,rcpt.region

wont work, but if I remove rcpt.region from the sql it works fine.

What's the deal here then?.

Thanks

PAtrick Mullen

Data Warehouse Officer
United Nations World Food Programme Received on Mon Jul 24 2000 - 06:38:15 CDT