select-1from from dual;

Looks like invalid, right? Well, let’s run it:

SQL> select-1from from dual;

       ROM
----------
 -1.0E+000

This is because:

1. Oracle doesn’t need whitespace for tokenizing the SQL statement (differences in character classes will do – as I’ve explained here)
2. The first from “keyword” in the above statement is broken down to two tokens as an “F” right after a digit means that the preceding number is a FLOAT (and “D” means DOUBLE) and the tokenizer stops right there, knowing that whatever comes after this character (“ROM”) is a next token, which according to the Oracle SQL syntax rules will be assigned as the output column alias

The following funky-looking SQL statements are also valid:

SQL> select.1e2ffrom dual;

     .1E2F
----------
  1.0E+001

SQL> select.1e2fas"."from dual;

         .
----------
  1.0E+001

In the upper example, the “.1e2f” means number .1 * 10^2 (scientific notation) represented as a FLOAT internally and in the lower one I’ve just added a column alias with “AS” keyword just to make the SQL look a bit crazier.

:-)

That’s useful for example for seeing the Oracle’s estimated index size without having to actually create the index.

You can also use EXPLAIN PLAN FOR ALTER INDEX i REBUILD to see whether this operation would use a FULL TABLE SCAN or a FAST FULL INDEX SCAN (offline index rebuilds of valid indexes can use this method).

Anyway, you can experiment with this yourself, but here’s a little quiz (with a little gotcha :)

What kind of index creation statement would create such an execution plan?

SQL> explain plan for create index hack_index on hack_table ....the rest is a secret for now....
Explained.

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 457720527
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                | Name                 | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | CREATE INDEX STATEMENT   |                      | 88868 |       |   657   (1)| 00:00:12 |
|   1 |  INDEX BUILD NON UNIQUE  | HACK_INDEX           |       |       |            |          |
|   2 |   SORT AGGREGATE         |                      |     1 |       |            |          |
|   3 |    VIEW                  | HACK_VIEW            | 74062 |       |   318   (1)| 00:00:06 |
|*  4 |     HASH JOIN            |                      | 74062 |  1012K|   210   (1)| 00:00:04 |
|   5 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL   | TEST_USERS           |    46 |   368 |     4   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|   6 |      INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| IDX2_INDEXED_OBJECTS | 74062 |   433K|   206   (1)| 00:00:04 |
|   7 |   SORT CREATE INDEX      |                      | 88868 |       |            |          |
|   8 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL     | HACK_TABLE           | 88868 |       |   544   (1)| 00:00:10 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------
4 - access("U"."USERNAME"="O"."OWNER")
Note
-----
- estimated index size: 3145K bytes