To complete this chapter, we examine the query optimization mechanisms used by
Oracle9i (Oracle Corporation, 2004b). We restrict the discussion in this section to optimization based on primitive data types. Later, in Section 28.5, we discuss how Oracle provides an extensible optimization mechanism to handle user-defined types. In this section
we use the terminology of the DBMS – Oracle refers to a relation as a table with columns
and rows. We provided an introduction to Oracle in Section 8.2.