1 - There needs to be some verbage describing the need to ensure the CBO statistics are current and accurate before running this function

2 - Considering how often the CBO gets the cardinality wrong there should probably be some warning about the accuracy

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HTH -- Mark D Powell --

Probably more importantly there is no example execution.  When I tried I got an Oracle error:

ORA-14551: cannot perform a DML operation inside a query

which makes me wonder if the code was tested before it was posted.

Also if you run it twice and do not change the statement_id you will get an ORA-01422: exact fetch returns more than requested number of rows since the first execution would place rows int the plan table under the statement_id.

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I suggest changing the function to a procedure and adding a delete on the plan table prior to running the explain.

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