From time to time someone publishes a query on the OTN database forum and asks how to make it go faster, and you look at it and think it’s a nice example to explain a couple of principles because it’s short, easy to understand, obvious what sort of things might be wrong, and easy to fix. Then, after you’ve made a couple of suggestions and explained a couple of ideas the provider simply fades into the distance and doesn’t tell you any more about the query, or whether they’ve taken advantage of your advice, or found some other way to address the problem.
Such a query, with its execution plan, appeared a couple of weeks ago: