Question about the ALWAYS_ANTI_JOIN init parameter

I'm looking for specifics about the differences between the three possible values for the ALWAYS_ANTI_JOIN parameter. It appears that the default is NESTED_LOOPS, and seems to work OK on our system, but what about the MERGE and HASH values? I know they will change how queries are executed, but how much different will they be?

Specifics about the system I'm talking about:
- DB engine runs with OPTIMIZER_MODE=RULE (for reasons I'll not get
  into with this post, I cannot change this value).
- The system is an OLTP system, typically with about 10GB of data
  spread over 280 tables, about 100 of which are large and/or high   volume.
- Using Oracle 7.3, Oracle 8 and Oracle 8i on various systems.

• Most (>90%) queries are using indexes or primary keys to access data.

Any insight you folks have will help me out.

Tobin Johnson
Oracle DBA
Catalyst International Received on Tue Jan 16 2001 - 19:58:08 CST