Outline Support

Outlines

Outlines provide powerful functionality. The functionality is enabled efficiently and easily with DB Optimizer.

How many people use them? – probably not that many but I think that is due to the difficulty of implementing them, but DB Optimizer solves the difficulty problem by make then easy to implement.

Basically there are 3 kinds of Oracle shops

1. Never use hints as a policy

2. Use hints on their own apps

3. Want to use hints but don’t have access to the SQL code

Using hints or not is almost a religious argument - there is probably truth on both sides.

For the second case, the user can use hints directly in the code, but sometimes it’s just faster and easier to use an outline when given a product like DB Optimizer. In a matter of seconds DB Optimizer can put a hint in place on a live system via hints where a code change might take days or weeks.

For the third case, outlines can be a life saver. If the customer has a bad query in a 3rd party application and they know a hint will solve everything but they can’t touch the code, then it can be terribly frustrating situation. Outlines solve this case.