How to Tune SQL Statements with NO_RANGE_OPTIMIZATION Injection?

There are some SQL statements with performance problem can be tuned by Hints injection only. Here is an example to show you how to use NO_RANGE_OPTIMIZATION optimization hints to tune a SQL statement.

A simple example SQL that retrieves data from EMPLOYEE and EMP_SAL_HIST tables.

select * from employee a,emp_sal_hist h
where a.emp_id =h.sal_emp_id

and a.emp_dept < 'B'
and h.sal_salary between 1000000 and 2000000​

Here the following are the query plans of this SQL, it takes 24.3 seconds. The query shows an Index Range Scan (EMPS_DPT_INX) of EMPLOYEE and then Nested Loop to EMP_SAL_HIST with a Non-Unique Key Lookup of SALS_EMP_INX index.

The EMP_SAL_HIST is the employee’s salary history table which keeps more than one salary record for each employee. So, EMPLOYEE to EMP_SAL_HIST is a one-to-many relationship. The speed of a nested loop operation is highly dependent on the driving path of two nested loop tables. MySQL SQL optimizer estimated that the condition (a.emp_dept < 'B') can rapidly reduce the result set, so the driving path that “from EMPLOYEE to EMP_SAL_HIST” is selected.

Unless you fully understand the data distribution and do a very precise calculation, otherwise you are not able to tell whether this driving path is the best or not.

How to make MySQL consider another driving path “from EMP_SAL_HIST to EMPLOYEE”? Let’s take a look at MySQL documentation:

NO_RANGE_OPTIMIZATION: Disable index range access for the specified table or indexes. This hint also disables Index Merge and Loose Index Scan for the table or indexes. By default, range access is a candidate optimization strategy, so there is no hint for enabling it.

This hint may be useful when the number of ranges may be high and range optimization would require many resources.

To disable the Index Range Scan of the EMPLOYEE table, I explicitly add a Hints /*+ QB_NAME(QB1) NO_RANGE_OPTIMIZATION(`a`@QB1) */ to the SQL statement and hope that MySQL will use the Index Range Scan by the condition (h.sal_salary between 1000000 and 2000000) as the first driving table.

select /*+ QB_NAME(QB1) NO_RANGE_OPTIMIZATION(`a`@QB1) */ *
from employee a,

emp_sal_hist h​

where a.emp_id = h.sal_emp_id

and a.emp_dept < 'B'
and h.sal_salary between 1000000 and 2000000​

Here is the result query plan of the Hints injected SQL and the execution time is reduced to 10.01 seconds. The new query plan shows that the driving path is changed from EMP_SAL_HIST table nested loop to EMPLOYEE table. So, sometimes you may make use of the NO_RANGE_OPTIMIZATION hint to control the driving path order to see if MySQL can run your SQL faster.
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This kind of rewrite can be achieved by Tosska SQL Tuning Expert for MySQL automatically, it shows that the Hints injected SQL is more than 2 times faster than the original SQL.

https://tosska.com/tosska-sql-tuning-expert-tse-for-mysql-2/