Hash Join with Partition restriction from third table - oracle

Question

my current problem is in 11g, but I am also interested in how this might be solved smarter in later versions.
I want to join two tables. Table A has 10 million rows, Table B is huge and has a billion of records across about a thousand partitions. One partition has around 10 million records. I am not joining on the partition key. For most rows of Table A, one or more rows in Table B will be found.
Example:
select * from table_a a
inner join table_b b on a.ref = b.ref
The above will return about 50 million rows, whereas the results come from about 30 partitions of table b. I am assuming a hash join is the correct join here, hashing table a and FTSing/index-scanning table b.
So, 970 partitions were scanned for no reason. And, I have a third query that could tell oracle which 30 partitions to check for the join.
Example of third query:
select partition_id from table_c
This query gives exactly the 30 partitions for the query above.
To my question:
In PL/SQL one can solve this by
select the 30 partition_ids into a variable (be it just a select listagg(partition_id,',') ... into v_partitions from table_c
Execute my query like so:
execute immediate 'select * from table_a a
inner join table_b b on a.ref = b.ref
where b.partition_id in ('||v_partitions||')' into ...
Let's say this completes in 10 minutes.
Now, how can I do this in the same amount of time with pure SQL?
Just simply writing
select * from table_a a
inner join table_b b on a.ref = b.ref
where b.partition_id in (select partition_id from table_c)
does not do the trick it seems, or I might be aiming at the wrong plan.
The plan I think I want is
hash join
table a
nested loop
table c
partition pruning here
table b
But, this does not come back in 10 minutes.
So, how to do this in SQL and what execution plan to aim at? One variation I have not tried yet that might be the solution is
nested loop
table c
hash join
table a
partition pruning here (pushed predicate from the join to c)
table b
Another feeling I have is that the solution might lie in joining table a to table c (not sure on what though) and then joining this result to table b.
I am not asking you to type everything out for me. Just a general concept of how to do this (getting partition restriction from a query) in SQL - what plan should I aim at?
thank you very much! Peter

Answer 1

I'm not an expert at this, but I think Oracle generally does the joins first, then applies the where conditions. So you might get the plan you want by moving the partition pruning up into a join condition:
select * from table_a a
inner join table_b b on a.ref = b.ref
and b.partition_id in (select partition_id from table_c);
I've also seen people try to do this sort of thing with an inline view:
select * from table_a a
inner join (select * from table_b
where partition_id in (select partition_id from table_c)) b
on a.ref = b.ref;

Answer 2

thank you all for your discussions with me on this one. In my case this was solved (not by me) by adding a join-path between table_c and table_a and by overloading the join conditions as below. In my case this was possible by adding column partition_id to table_a:
select * from
table_c c
JOIN table_a a ON (a.partition_id = c.partition_id)
JOIN table_b b ON (b.partition_id = c.partition_id and b.partition_id = a.partition_id and b.ref = a.ref)
And this is the plan you want:
leading(c,b,a) use_nl(c,b) swap_join_inputs(a) use_hash(a)
So you get:
hash join
table a
nested loop
table c
partition list iterator
table b