Here’s a note that has been sitting around for more than 3 years (the draft date is Jan 2015), waiting for me to finish it off; and in that time we’ve got a new version of Oracle that changes the solution to the problem it presented. (I also managed to write “Conditional SQL – 6” in the intervening period !)
This posting started with a question on the OTN (now ODC) database forum about an execution plan used by 11.2.0.3. Here’s a model to represent the data and the query: