Oracle Single Table Hash Clusters are Faster.

This post is about Single Table Hash Clusters.

It is also about The Fastest way to get to 1 single Record of data.
I will try to prove that with a demo.

This post (a bit of a rant, as usual) is prompted by several things:
Prompted by Richard Foote (Recommended reading), who justly argues that Every Block Get counts and who is on a mission to Educate us on the correct use of Indexes.
Prompted by a few reactions to my Endinburgh Presentation about (cost based-) optimized access to data. It all starts with good access-paths to your data.
Prompted by a client with 24 CPUs in a database-server, trying to squeeze the last milliseconds out of 25 million (business-)transactions per hour. (how many app-servers, JVMs and CPU's does it take to process 25 Million items per hour....?? - I don't want to divulge, but the numbers on the "estate" are multiples of 24...).
Prompted by a good lunch-discussion with same client on IOTs and other nerdy but sometimes crucial optimizations (more material for posts and demos, thx J)

In this particular case, the client had a requirement to (repeatedly??) check existence and/or content of a record based on PK-access. This particular data was relatively static (lookup-type data) and apparently only modified overnight.

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There is also the need to check on certain values for de-duplication, and that is a different and more challenging matter. Such de-dup-data is modified (inserted) constantly, and needs to be purged based on time, hence "needs" another index. I might eleborate on that some other time.

For the moment, I will also deliberately discard the possibilities of using SQL-resultset-caching by Oracle, or the option of Hash-map tables or other (indexed-)arrays cached by some Java component, or Oracle Coherence. All of those I consider usable, but much more complex and intrusive then a Simple, well-designed database-solution.
I am a data-beast after all.

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Why (not) clusters...

Single Table Hash Clusters can fetch a row with a Single Block Get. That beats any other method of access.

Of course, those who have read and understood the manuals, metalink, and various books on the subject already know all of this, and dont need to waste their time on here. But I see surprisingly few implementations of Clusters and IOTs ...

Normally, I shy away from using clusters because you need to know up front:
1) How many records go into your tables (parents and children for multi-table clusters), and
2) How big those records will be and
3) For Hash-clusters, Critical access is on the clusterkey.
Those three conditions are rarely met, and even more difficult to enforce over the lifetime of a system. But sometimes you get lucky.
And if any of the Oracle Cluster-constructions is useful, my vote goes to Single Table Hash Clusters. Simple, Elegant and ... Fast!

If you already know your theory about Single-Table-Hash-clusters, you dont need to read on. You know we will end up showing 1 single consistent get...


The DIY Demo

The rest of the post will allow you yourself to demonstrate on your database how Fast Single Table Hash Clusters can be.

Copy this into your SQL*Plus:

SQL> @http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2531452_b8v0g/demo_sthc.sql

Press enter a few times, and you can re-read the output in your own spool file...

The script creates 3 tables; a heaptable, an IOT and a Single-Table-Hash-Clustered one. All tables are filled with the same 64K records. The Key is deliberately chosen to be a Varchar2 with funny distribution to resemble client case. And as it uses the Julian date 'JSP' format to generate spelled-out-numbers, your results may vary depending on your NLS settings. Any quirks or issues: send me a comment or a postcard.

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If anyone spots flaws in the demo: let us know in a comment or an email. My knowledge is only skindeep and errors are easily made. Nor am I as skilled in education as Jonathan Lewis or Tom Kyte. My original demo was only whipped up to show to an Architect. Getting stuff out ready for the dba-community-at-large is more work then I anticipated, and my knowlege on the subject of Clusters is not as deep as I wished.

And if my demo-script fails you, check out the only other mention of STHC-with-demo that I recall seeing, by Joze Senegacnik here.

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The demo uses on only 64k records as that was an amount I could test and re-test on my laptop in reasonable timeframes (10 seconds, I'm an impatient person). But it will work on Any size table, as long as the same conditions are met: knowing your data (numbers and size of records), and accessing on (PK-)equal condtion. Single Table Hash Clusters scale nicely.

The demo script can be found Here: demo_sthc.sql. It can be run with no modification in just about any schema able to create tables, indexes and clusters (of course, I always log on as system, but I have tested on 9.2.0.8, 10.2.0.3 and 11.1.0.6...).


The Single table Has cluster is created like this:

create cluster clu 
( key         varchar2(78 byte) 
)
single table
hashkeys 1000;

CREATE TABLE clut
( key           VARCHAR2(78 BYTE),
  num_key       NUMBER,
  date_modified DATE,
  padding       VARCHAR2(300 BYTE), 
  constraint clut_pk primary key ( key)
)
CLUSTER clu ( key );

Note that the 1000 hashkeys I use is based on the fact that I cold fit approx 64 records in my 8K blocks, your results will vary if you use different blocksize or different size records. All those nitty-gritty details are part of why this is a rather nerdy and underused concept. Material for a follow-up here...

When the table is filled, I then fire some selects with a Key=value condition at the tables, and I use Autotrace to examine the 2nd execute of each query, like this:

select * from heap
where key = 'FIVE HUNDRED'
/
set autotrace on
/
set autotrace off

So, How Fast is this thing ... ?

(Did you run the demo in your own database yet... ?)


For a Single Table Hash Cluster, the result is 1 (one) Consistent get.


The result for a conventional heap table is 4 consistent gets. For an IOT it is 3 consistent gets (same index, but no table-access). And these numbers risk to increase by 1 if the blevel of the indexes goes from 2 to 3.

That may not seem like a big improvement, but it happens to be 3 or 4 times less Logical IO then the alternatives. And if executed at 25-million/hr, that is still a significant saving in LIO.

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Of course, there is more to it. Such as the additional CPU-usage, chooseing the hash-key and guesstimating the size-value. And how does it perform when your data-volume unexpectedly explodes and it all goes horribly wrong....
I might re-run the demo a bit and experiment. I see a follow-up coming on the next long train journey.

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