Managing stored outlines

In production environments, there is a very simple golden rule about database performance—it's better to have a database that always performs quite well than a database that performs even 10 times faster but not always; that is, a database whose performance sometimes dips.

Execution plan stability is a must for ensuring performance that persists over time; in production environments, we need an optimal and predictable performance.

In this recipe, we will see how to create stored outlines to achieve execution plan stability and how to manage these stored outlines.

Getting ready

To create stored outlines, we need an appropriate grant. Connect to the database as SYSDBA, and grant the user SH permission to create stored outlines:

CONNECT / AS SYSDBA
GRANT CREATE ANY OUTLINE TO sh;

How to do it...

The following steps will demonstrate stored outlines, their creation, and management:

1. Connect to SH schema:

   CONNECT sh@TESTDB/sh
   

2. Execute a query on the CUSTOMERS and COUNTRIES tables...