make the optimizer use all columns of an index

Question

we have a few tables storing temporal data that have natural a primary key consisting of 3 columns. Example: maximum temperature for this day. This is the Composite Primary key index (in this order):

id number(10): the id of the timeserie.
day date: the day for which this data was reported
kill_at timestamp: the last timestamp before this data was deleted or updated.

Simplified logic: When we make a forecast at 10:00am, then the last entry found for this id/day combination has his create_at changed to 9:59am and the newly calculated value is stored with a kill_at timestamp of '31.12.2999'.

typical queries on this table are:

1) where id=? and day=? and kill_at=?
2) where id=? and day between (? and ?) and kill_at=?
3) where id=? and day between (? and ?)
4) where id=?

There are plenty of timeseries that we do not forecast. That means we get one valued when it's measured and it never changes. But there are some timeseries that we forecast 200-300 times. So for one id/day combination there are 200+ entries with different values for kill_at.

We currently only have the primary key (id, day, kill_at) as the only (unique) index on this table. But when I query with query 2 (exact id and day range), then the optimizer decides to only use the first column of the index.

ID  OPERATION         OPTIONS          OBJECT_NAME  OPTIMIZER  SEARCH_COLUMNS
 0  SELECT STATEMENT                                ALL_ROWS   0
 1  FILTER                                                     0
 2  TABLE ACCESS      BY INDEX ROWID   DPD                     0
 3  INDEX             RANGE SCAN       DPD_PK                  1

This really hurts us for those timeseries that have been updates 200+ times. Now I was looking for a way to force the optimizer to use all 3 columns of our index, but I can't find a hint for that. Is there one?

Or are there any other suggestions on how to speed up my query? We try to reduce the peak durations. The average Durations are of lesser concern.

what confuses me: The above execution plan is what I see in dba_hist_sql_plan. It is the only execution plan for this statement. But when I let my client show the explain plan, then it is sometimes a 1 or a 3 for search_columns. But it never is 3 for when our application runs this Statement.

Answer 1

we actually found the cause of this problem. We're using JPA/JDBC and the JDBC date types weren't modeled correctly. While the oracle date type is with second precision, somebody (I now hate him) made the "day" attribute in our entity of type java.sql.Timestamp (although it is only day without time). The effect is that Oracle will need to cast (use a function on) each entry in the table to make it a Timestamp before it can compare with the Timestamp query parameter. That way the index cannot be used properly.