This note was prompted by an error I made at the UKOUG TechFest19 yesterday. It’s fairly well-known that when you read an execution plan that includes the rowsource execution stats– so you get the E-rows (estimated) and A-rows (Actual) reported – then a sensible check of the quality of the optimizer’s calculations is to compare the estimates and actuals allowing for the fact that the E-rows is “per start” and the A-rows is “cumulative”, so A-rows = E-rows * Starts.
The error I made yesterday was to forget that this relationship isn’t always true. In particular partitioning and parallel query introduced the need to be a little flexibility in reading the numbers – which I’ll demonstrate with a coupld of simple examples running under 12.2.0.1