Automatic SQL Error Mitigation in Oracle

Abstract

Despite best coding practices, software bugs are inevitable in a large codebase. In traditional databases, when errors occur during query processing, they disrupt user workflow until workarounds are found and applied. Manual identification of workarounds often relies on a trial-and-error method. The process is not only time-consuming but also requires domain expertise that users are often lacking. In this paper, we propose a framework to automatically mitigate errors that occur during query compilation (including optimization and code generation) without any user intervention. An error is intercepted by the database internally, a workaround is identified for it, and the query is recompiled using the workaround. The entire process remains transparent to the user with the query being executed seamlessly. The proposed technique handles SQL errors during query compilation and provides three types of mitigation strategies - i) quickly failover to one of the readily-available historical plans for the statement ii) apply targeted error-correcting directives (hints) identified from the optimizer context at the time of the error iii) modify the global configuration of the optimizer using hints. This feature has been implemented and will be released in an upcoming version of Oracle Autonomous Database.