Oracle recent version improves bind variable performance?

In another thread I was reporting how a query I do with bind variables performs worse than an equivalent query done via strings.. One person responded that a more recent version of Oracle improves upon this. I started a new post because I wanted to ask about that... I definitely want to know about this if it is true so I can try the new version.

I'm running Oracle 10.2.0.1.0 on Windows platform.

Is there a newer version or patch that makes Oracle perform queries better, that use bind variables?

This was the previous post:

: We have a PowerBuilder application where we started noticing the
: performance of a query is worse if you do it with bind variables
then
: if you do the same query as a string.

Bind variables minimize the number of times a query must be parsed. That
is likely to speed up your application if the same queries are used multiple times.

Hard coded values allow the optimizer to select the best possible path to
select the data. That is likely to speed up your application if a query
is only run once, or if the time to parse the query is small compared to
the time it takes to run the query, especially if the values are unusual
compared to most of the data.

Apparently more recent versions of Oracle (version?) will examine the values of bind variables before running a query as a sanity check that the
existing parsed query will still be sensible for those values. I know not
the exact details. Received on Tue Sep 18 2007 - 11:13:00 CDT