It’s been a long time since I said anything interesting about transitive closure in Oracle, the mechanism by which Oracle can infer that if a = b and b = c then a = c but only (in Oracle’s case) if one of a, b, or c is a literal constant rather than a column. So with that quick reminder in place, here’s an example of optimizer mechanics to worry you. It’s not actually a demonstration of transitive closure coming into play, but I wanted to remind you of the logic to set the scene.
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