RE: Wow - has anyone used ROW_NUMBER() to get around using a UNION statement when UNION ALL doesn't work??

Thank you for clarifying the issues. I'm going to put together all the information in once place and send this back out. Then, I'd be interested in hearing your analysis.

Thanks,

Chris Taylor
Sr. Oracle DBA
Ingram Barge Company
Nashville, TN 37205
Office: 615-517-3355
Cell: 615-663-1673
Email: chris.taylor_at_ingrambarge.com
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Schneider [mailto:jeremy.schneider_at_ardentperf.com] Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 5:19 PM
To: mwf_at_rsiz.com
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org; Taylor, Chris David Subject: Re: Wow - has anyone used ROW_NUMBER() to get around using a UNION statement when UNION ALL doesn't work??

On 8/8/2011 11:27 AM, Mark W. Farnham wrote:
> In the event that you know a subset of the columns of a UNION ALL
> projection such that ordering by the column subset guarantees that
> duplicates appear together, then you can generate that special case of
> UNION ALL to UNION de-duplication at a lower cost. Chris has related
> one such mechanism, using the ROW_NUMBER() analytical function. It may
> have been unclear that he was relying on a subset of the columns of
> the projection. If he needed all the columns for the grouping, his
> mechanism would be at best a tie (and I write that in the sense that
> the best you can do in any transfer of energy is have zero increase in
> entropy, except you really can only break even in the math and in
> reality you always lose.)

I think that in his original email, Chris said he included all the columns in the "partition by" clause.

On 8/5/2011 1:35 PM, Taylor, Chris David wrote:
> Now, I put the query containing the UNION ALL in an INNER select, and
> I select all columns from it PLUS the ROW_NUMBER() function
> partitioning by all the columns and applying an order by to the
> function and call this column "ROW_KEY" (not very original I know).

Which is why there are so many questions about this. As Mark has pointed out, if you're partitioning on all the columns then you're doing exactly the same sort that's the UNION is doing. Something just isn't quite right about the results; both methods should be doing nearly the identical work.

Or to put it another way, if manually sorting all the records and removing dups addes 0 seconds and 0 TEMP tablespace to the subquery without the ROW_NUMBER() analytic clause, then either the sort is not really happening (the fastest way to do anything) or there's something wrong with the UNION which ought to be running in the same amount of time and resources. At least this is how it seems to me, and might be the reason there are so many questions.

-Jeremy

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Jeremy Schneider
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