hint injection in 10g??

Someone was telling me that there's a new feature in 10g, similar to stored outlines that does something like this:

Suppose you have a query coming in to the database that you simply can't change, and suppose you have cursor sharing set so that oracle substitutes bind variables in place of literals.

Now, let's say you want to alter the execution plan using any hint, but cannot inject that hint into the original application source code, apparently there is some feature that now lets you substitute a very specific "cooked" execution plan in place of the one the optimizer generates using a text match.

I know this is very much like stored outlines, but with stored outlines, you can only switch between the high level optimizer modes ... first_rows, rule, all_rows, and generate the outline.

Does this make sense, or was I misinformed? Can this type of fine-grained control be done with stored outlines?

Example ...

You want to inject a /*+ INDEX(...) */ or /*+ DRIVING_SITE ... */ at the back end because you can't access the compiled application code to stick it in there. Received on Fri Jan 23 2004 - 15:58:48 CST