christian wrote:
Really? This would be an interesting change
yes, at least that was the conculsion reached by our DB-team's brief look at Oracle 10g as a candidate requirement for our next release.
There seems to be some other options to simulate the rule based optimizer hower, for example "http://www.dba-oracle.com/art_otn_cbo.htm", so it might not be a major issue after all. The problem for us was that a lot of hand-tuned queries would have to be revalidated that they still generated the expected performance characteristics when the underlying optimizer changes radically.