Multiple choice technology databases

HINTS should be used to parallelise an operation if the operation is FULL TABLE SCAN ?

  1. True

  2. False
Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
B Correct answer
Explanation

Hints should not be used for full table scans because the optimizer already chooses full table scans when appropriate based on statistics. Forcing parallelism via hints can degrade performance if the operation doesn't actually benefit from it. The optimizer automatically determines when parallel execution is beneficial.

AI explanation

Hints shouldn't be blindly applied just because a query happens to do a full table scan — the optimizer already chooses a full table scan when it's the most efficient plan for the data volume and available indexes, and forcing parallelism on top of that isn't automatically beneficial and can even hurt performance under memory or CPU pressure. Hints are meant to be used selectively when the optimizer's chosen plan is demonstrably suboptimal, not as an automatic reflex tied to a single plan feature.

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