This is a note I drafted in September 2015 and only rediscovered a couple of days ago while searching for something I was sure I’d written about collections and/or table functions. The intention of collections and table functions is that they should behave like tables when you use them in a query – but there are cases where a real table and something cast to a table() aren’t treated the same way by the optimizer – and this 4-year old note (which is still valid in 2020 for 19c) is one of those cases.