You’ve probably heard about adaptive cursor sharing, and possibly you’ve wondered why you haven’t seen it happening very often on your production systems (assuming you’re running a modern version of Oracle). Here’s a little bug/fix that may explain the non-appearance.
MOS Doc ID 9532657.8 Adaptive cursor sharing ignores SELECTs which are not fully fetched.
This bug is confirmed in 11.2.0.1, and fixed in 11.2.0.3. The problem is that the ACS code doesn’t process the statistical information from the cursor unless the cursor reaches “end of fetch” – i.e. if you don’t select all the data in your query, Oracle doesn’t consider the statistics of that execution when deciding whether or not to re-optimise a statement.
