6 million + records, query takes more than 50 min to execute.

Question

Hi
I am trying to get records from a table which has more than 6 million of records.
The value set of the particular col IND can be
NULL
'0'
'1'
and other value like A B '6'
The data type of IND is varchar.
I want all the records where the value is other than NULL, 0 and 1
I tried this simple query
SELECT ID, IND
FROM tablename
WHERE
IND IS NOT NULL
AND IND <> '0'
AND IND <> '1'
Now this query is taking more than 30-40 min. Is this a way I can speed up this query. Also I can't index on the column.
any suggestions ?

Answer 1

I don't know anything about your tables or hardware (nor your Oracle version because you didn't post it) but 30 - 40 minutes seems excessive for a full table scan on only 6 million rows.
On my lowly test instance, this full table scan takes a little over a minute:
| Id  | Operation          | Name                  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT   |                       |     1 |     4 |  4800   (2)| 00:01:11 |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE    |                       |     1 |     4 |            |          |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS FULL| ATLAS_SALES_HISTORY   |  6618K|    25M|  4800   (2)| 00:01:11 |
Statistics
        631  recursive calls
          0  db block gets
      55740  consistent gets
      55609  physical reads
          0  redo size
        415  bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
        346  bytes received via SQL*Net from client
          2  SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
         15  sorts (memory)
          0  sorts (disk)
          1  rows processedAre you pulling all 6 million rows across the network to your client machine? (And waiting for the rows to scroll?)