Improving SQL Exists scalability - oracle

Question

Say we have two tables, TEST and TEST_CHILDS in the following way:
creat TABLE TEST(id1 number PRIMARY KEY, word VARCHAR(50),numero number);
creat TABLE TEST_CHILD (id2 number references test(id), word2 VARCHAR(50));
CREATE INDEX TEST_IDX ON TEST_CHILD(word2);
CREATE INDEX TEST_JOIN_IDX ON TEST_CHILD(id);
insert into TEST SELECT ROWNUM,U1.USERNAME||U2.TABLE_NAME, LENGTH(U1.USERNAME) FROM ALL_USERS U1,ALL_TABLES U2;
INSERT INTO TEST_CHILD SELECT MOD(ROWNUM,15000)+1,U1.USER_ID||U2.TABLE_NAME FROM ALL_USERS U1,ALL_TABLES U2;
We would like to query to get rows from TEST table that satisfy some criteria in the child table, so we go for:
SELECT /*+FIRST_ROWS(10)*/* FROM TEST T WHERE EXISTS (SELECT NULL FROM TEST_CHILD TC WHERE word2 like 'string%' AND TC.id = T.id ) AND ROWNUM < 10;
We always want just the first 10 results, not any more at all. Therefore, we would like to get the same response time to read 10 results whether table has 10 matching values or 1,000,000; since it could get 10 distinct results from the child table and get the values on the parent table (or at least that is the plan that we would like). But when checking the actual execution plan we see:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id | Operation | Name | Rows | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 1 | 54 | 5 (20)| 00:00:01 |
|* 1 | COUNT STOPKEY | | | | | |
| 2 | NESTED LOOPS | | | | | |
| 3 | NESTED LOOPS | | 1 | 54 | 5 (20)| 00:00:01 |
| 4 | SORT UNIQUE | | 1 | 23 | 3 (0)| 00:00:01 |
| 5 | TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| TEST_CHILD | 1 | 23 | 3 (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 6 | INDEX RANGE SCAN | TEST_IDX | 1 | | 2 (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 7 | INDEX UNIQUE SCAN | SYS_C005145 | 1 | | 0 (0)| 00:00:01 |
| 8 | TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID | TEST | 1 | 31 | 1 (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
1 - filter(ROWNUM<10)
6 - access("WORD2" LIKE 'string%')
filter("WORD2" LIKE 'string%')
7 - access("TC"."ID"="T"."ID")
SORT UNIQUE under the STOPKEY, what afaik means that it is reading all results from the child table, making the distinct to finally select only the first 10, making the query not as scalable as we would like it to be.
Is there any mistake in my example?
Is it possible to improve this execution plan so it scales better?

Answer 1

The SORT UNIQUE is going to find and sort all of the records from TEST_CHILD that matched 'string%' - it is NOT going to read all results from child table. Your logic requires this. IF you only picked the first 10 rows from TEST_CHILD that matched 'string%', and those 10 rows all had the same ID, then your final results from TEST would only have 1 row.
Anyway, your performance should be fine as long as 'string%' matches a relatively low number of rows in TEST_CHILD. IF your situation is such that 'string%' often matches a HUGE record count on TEST_CHILD, there's not much you can do to make the SQL more performant given the current tables. In such a case, if this is a mission-critical SQL, with performance tied to your annual bonus, there's probably some fancy footwork you could do with MATERIALIZED VIEWs to, e.g. pre-compute 10 TEST rows for high-cardinality WORD2 values in TEST_CHILD.
One final thought - a "risky" solution, but one which should work if you don't have thousands of TEST_CHILD rows matching the same TEST row, would be the following:
SELECT *
FROM TEST
WHERE ID1 IN
(SELECT ID2
FROM TEST_CHILD
WHERE word2 like 'string%'
AND ROWNUM < 1000)
AND ROWNUM <10;
You can adjust 1000 up or down, of course, but if it's too low, you risk finding less than 10 distinct ID values, which would give you final results with less than 10 rows.