Outlines override Baselines even in 11gR2 (at least as of 11.2.0.2).

here’s the connex between dba_sql_plan_baselines and v$sql:

select s.*, b.*
from dba_sql_plan_baselines b,
v$sql s
where s.exact_matching_signature = b.signature
and s.sql_plan_baseline = b.plan_name;

Thx 4 your great Blog.

Yeah, it’s very closely related. The Outline object consists of a set of hints that is applied to a statement and is similar to a SQL Profile and a Baseline. But they are stored in different ways and presumably use different code paths (although some of the code may be the same). At any rate, Outlines have been documented as deprecated since 11.1 (from the 11gR2 Database Upgrade Guide – “The use of stored outlines is deprecated in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1).”) I’d definitely prefer to use SQL Profiles or Baselines at this point.

The ADVANCED option on dbms_xplan.display_cursor spits out the content of the OTHER_XML field in V$SQL_PLAN. It is the set of hints that Oracle thinks are necessary to recreate the plan. I’ve written about that somewhere on this blog.

Kerry

Above you say “I’m starting to worry about Outlines getting buggy due to lack of attention.”. It seems though that SPM is using outlines to (re)generate the plans. The data in sys.sqlobj$data.comp_data is basically an outline. It has the same info you would get if you run “select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(‘&sqlid’,&child_number,’ADVANCED’))” and look at the outline data.
Thought that was interesting… Maybe you don’t need to worry :-)

Jan

I’ll give that a look when I have a few minutes.

Kerry