Schlagwort: Parameters markers

DB2 z/OS literal replacement:

Do you know the queries to list the Dynamic SQL which have literals or Parameter markers?

Here is a very handy method to (fairly) quickly see if you have a literal problem that is killing the DSC or causing access path problems.

I was asked by a customer the other week, to help them out with a classic DB2 SQL Performance problem involving dynamic SQL. Should Literals or Parameter markers be used in dynamic SQL? Now, of course, the classic answer is: “It depends.” But this customer wanted to go a stage further and get a list of all the dynamic SQL which had literals in the text.

EXPLAIN to the rescue!

Naturally an EXPLAIN must be the starting point, because manually parsing the SQL text is incredibly difficult. If you have paid for the DB2 Optimizer—and the ability of EXPLAIN to output to seventeen tables—why not use it and see what you get?

Manual time

After trolling through various manuals, it quickly becomes apparent that the table of choice is the DSN_PREDICAT_TABLE, as it contains at least one row for each predicate and, after all, it is predicates that are truly interesting for the optimizer. (Naturally DSC usage also hangs on the use, or not, of literals also in the SELECT—but that is another story!)

What is in the table?

The contents are quite simple really:

SELECT  A.QUERYNO                 Identification

      , A.QBLOCKNO                Identification

      , A.APPLNAME                Identification

      , A.PROGNAME                Identification

      , A.PREDNO                  Identification

      , A.TYPE                    Type of op AND, OR, EQUAL etc

      , A.LEFT_HAND_SIDE          Column/Value/colexp etc

      , A.LEFT_HAND_PNO           Child predicate number

      , A.LHS_TABNO               Table no.

      , A.LHS_QBNO                Query Block no.

      , A.RIGHT_HAND_SIDE         As left hand

      , A.RIGHT_HAND_PNO          As left hand

      , A.RHS_TABNO               As left hand

      , A.RHS_QBNO                As left hand

      , A.FILTER_FACTOR           Estimated FF

      , A.BOOLEAN_TERM            Whole WHERE is Boolean?

      , A.SEARCHARG               DM or RDS?

      , A.JOIN                    Simple join or not?

      , A.AFTER_JOIN              Predicate after/during join?

      , A.ADDED_PRED              T Transitive clos., B Bubble,
                                  C correlation,

                                  J Join, K like, L local, P push down,

                                  R page range, S simplification

      , A.REDUNDANT_PRED          Is the predicate redundant?

      , A.DIRECT_ACCESS           ROWID Possible?

      , A.KEYFIELD                Is the predicate in indexes?

      , A.EXPLAIN_TIME            Identification

      , A.CATEGORY                IBM Internal use

      , A.CATEGORY_B              IBM Internal use

      , A.TEXT                    First 2000 bytes of text

      , A.PRED_ENCODE             IBM Internal use

      , A.PRED_CCSID              IBM Internal use

      , A.PRED_MCCSID             IBM Internal use

      , A.MARKER                  Host vars, parameter markers,
                                  special regs

      , A.PARENT_PNO              If a root predicate then zero

      , A.NEGATION                Is NOT used?

      , A.LITERALS                Literals separated by colons

      , A.CLAUSE                  HAVING, ON, WHERE or SELECT

      , A.GROUP_MEMBER            Identification

      , A.ORIGIN                  Origin of predicate. Blank, C, R or U

      , A.UNCERTAINTY             Level of uncertainty

      , A.SECTNOI                 Identification

      , A.COLLID                  Identification

      , A.VERSION                 Identification

--V11 , A.EXPANSION_REASON        Archive or Temporal table indicator

FROM BOXWELL.DSN_PREDICAT_TABLE A

The first four columns are used for joining to your existing EXPLAIN tables (PLAN_TABLE etc.)

Columns of interest

Now what interested me straightaway, were the columns MARKER and LITERALS. Looking in the Managing Performance documentation you see that these columns:

MARKER CHAR(1) NOT NULL WITH DEFAULT

Whether this predicate includes host variables, parameter markers, or special Registers.

LITERALS VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL

This column indicates the literal value or literal values separated by colon symbols.

So now it looks quite easy just do a select where LITERALS is non blank. Of course that fails miserably…

First attempt

Here’s an SQL that shows what comes out:

This looks like lots of literals, but is actually just one WHERE predicate and one ON being broken down. So I thought “Aha! The PARENT_PNO must be the problem.” Sure enough, when you add AND PARENT_PNO = 0 to the SQL it now Returns:

Now all of the ON data has vanished, so you must add an OR into the query:

Second attempt

Giving us now this Output:

The COLEXP row SQL text looks like:

SUBSTR(DIGITS("A"."CORR_TYPE"),1,10)

So we can also exclude these rows from the select.

Still duplicates?

This*still* looks like duplicates, but now pushed down to the ON clause in this context. Final fix is to make sure that the LHS_TABNO and RHS_TABNO are both equal to zero. Now we have the “literal finder” SQL:

Host with no colon?

Which gives (excluding the first columns for clarity!):

See the HV2 and then the list of HVs? Now this is not documented at all! A comma separated list of host variables… super…

All we can now do, at least in standard SQL, is split the output into two distinct blocks, one where MARKER is ‘N’ so no host variables or special registers are involved, and one where they are! It should be easy to remove the HVs and then see if the LITERALS column is empty—or not—but that is a bit more than a simple newsletter can possibly do!

And Finally

So now the final two queries:

SELECT QUERYNO , QBLOCKNO , PREDNO                 
      ,LITERALS
      ,TEXT                                        
FROM BOXWELL.DSN_PREDICAT_TABLE                    
WHERE NOT LITERALS = ''                            
  AND ((CLAUSE = 'WHERE'                           
    AND PARENT_PNO = 0)                            
    OR CLAUSE = 'ON')                              
  AND NOT RIGHT_HAND_SIDE = 'COLEXP'               
  AND LHS_TABNO = 0                                
  AND RHS_TABNO = 0                                
  AND MARKER    = 'N'                              
ORDER BY QUERYNO , QBLOCKNO , PREDNO               
;                                                  
SELECT QUERYNO , QBLOCKNO , PREDNO                 
      ,LITERALS
      ,TEXT                                        
FROM BOXWELL.DSN_PREDICAT_TABLE                    
WHERE NOT LITERALS = ''                            
  AND ((CLAUSE = 'WHERE'                           
    AND PARENT_PNO = 0)                            
    OR CLAUSE = 'ON')                              
  AND NOT RIGHT_HAND_SIDE = 'COLEXP'               
  AND LHS_TABNO = 0                                
  AND RHS_TABNO = 0                                
  AND MARKER    = 'Y'                              
ORDER BY QUERYNO , QBLOCKNO , PREDNO               
;

This gives you a very handy method to (fairly) quickly see if you have a literal problem that is killing the DSC or causing access path problems at your shop.

I hope you liked this month’s topic.

As always, any questions or comments would be most welcome!

TTFN,

Roy Boxwell

Once again for your cut and paste (the queries presented first of all as a screenshot):

Query 1

SELECT CLAUSE, PARENT_PNO, SUBSTR(RIGHT_HAND_SIDE , 1 , 8)
      ,LHS_TABNO, RHS_TABNO                               
      ,MARKER, LITERALS                             
FROM BOXWELL.DSN_PREDICAT_TABLE                           
WHERE NOT LITERALS = ''                  
Output1                 
-----+-------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
CLAUSE PARENT_PNO        LHS_TABNO  RHS_TABNO  MARKER  LITERALS
-----+-----+---------+---------+---------+---------+-----------+
WHERE      0                    0           0  N       0,1,'W' 
WHERE      1  VALUE             2           0  N       0,1     
WHERE      1  VALUE             3           0  N       'W'     
ON         1  COLEXP            2           0  N       1,10    
ON         1  VALUE             2           0  N       'F'     
ON         1  VALUE             2           0  N       'en_US'


Output2
-----+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+------
CLAUSE     PARENT_PNO            LHS_TABNO  RHS_TABNO  MARKER  LITERALS
-----+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+------
WHERE               0                    0          0  N       0,1,'W'

Output3
-----+--------+--------+---------+---------+-----------------
CLAUSE PARENT_PNO     LHS_TABNO RHS_TABNO MARKER LITERALS
-----+-------+--------+---------+----------------------------
WHERE    0                 0            0  N     'X',' ',
                                                  220,219,1,10,'F’
ON       1  COLEXP         2            0  N      1,10
ON       1  VALUE          2            0  N     'F' 
ON       1  VALUE          2            0  N     'en_US'
WHERE    0  VALUE          3            0  N     'X'

Output4
-----+---------+---------+---------+---------+----------+----
 CLAUSE PARENT_PNO    LHS_TABNO  RHS_TABNO  MARKER LITERALS
 -----+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+----
 WHERE   0                0              0  N      'X','
                                                   ',220,219,1,10,'F’
 ON      1  VALUE         2              0  N      'F'
 ON      1  VALUE         2              0  N      'en_US'
 WHERE   0  VALUE         3              0  N      'X'

Query 2

SELECT QUERYNO , QBLOCKNO , PREDNO                 
      ,MARKER, SUBSTR(LITERALS, 1 , 32) AS LITERALS
      ,TEXT                                        
FROM BOXWELL.DSN_PREDICAT_TABLE                    
WHERE NOT LITERALS = ''                            
  AND ((CLAUSE = 'WHERE'                           
    AND PARENT_PNO = 0)                            
    OR CLAUSE = 'ON')                              
  AND NOT RIGHT_HAND_SIDE = 'COLEXP'               
  AND LHS_TABNO = 0                                
  AND RHS_TABNO = 0                                
ORDER BY QUERYNO , QBLOCKNO , PREDNO               
;

Output5

MARKER  LITERALS                          TEXT                                    
---+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+--------
N 'X','X','T'                  (((((((((((("B"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"=(SELECT 
N 'X','X','T'                  (((((((((((("B"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"=(SELECT 
Y  HV2,'S'                     ("IQA0610"."IQATW001"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"=(E
N 'X'                          ("Z"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"="A"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"
N 'X'                          ("Z"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"="A"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"
N 'X','X','I','  '             ((((((((((("B"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"=(SELECT M
N 'X','X','I','  '             ((((((((((("B"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"=(SELECT M
N 'X'                          ("Z"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"="A"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"
N  X'                          ("Z"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"="A"."WLX_TIMESTAMP"
Y  HV1,HV2,HV3,HV4,HV5,'F',HV6 ((((("SYSIBM"."SYSCOPY"."DBNAME"=(EXPR)