Reblogged from Oracle Scratchpad:
I have a small collection of postings where I've described anomalies or limitations in subquery factoring (the "with subquery", or Common Table Expression (CTE) to give it the official ANSI name). Here's another example of Oracle's code not behaving consistently. You may recognise the basic query from yesterday's example of logical tuning - so I won't reprint the code to generate the data sets.