People ask me from time to time if I’m going to write another book on the Cost Based Optimizer – and I think the answer has to be no because the product keeps growing so fast it’s not possible to keep up and because there are always more and more little details that might have been around for years and finally show up when someone asks me a question about some little oddity I’ve never noticed before.
The difficult with the “little oddities” is the amount of time you could spend trying to work out whether or not they matter and if it’s worth writing about them. Here’s a little example to show what I mean – first the data set: