Basically the most fundamental (or biggest or most important) difference between nested loop and hash joins is that:
- Hash joins can not look up rows from the inner (probed) row source based on values retrieved from the outer (driving) row source, nested loops can.
In other words, when joining table A and B (A is driving table, B is the probed table), then a nested loop join can take 1st row from A and perform a lookup to B using that value (of the column(s) you join by). Then nested loop takes the next row from A and performs another lookup to table B using the new value. And so on and so on and so on.
This opens up additional access paths to the table B, for example when joining ORDERS and ORDER_ITEMS by ORDER_ID (and ORDER_ID is leading column of PK in ORDER_ITEMS table), then for whatever orders are taken from ORDERS table, we can perform a focused, narrow index range scan on ORDER_ITEMS for every ORDER_ID retrieved from the driving ORDERS table. A hash join can’t do that.
Of course this doesn’t mean that hash joins can’t use any indexes for tables they read – index range scans and unique lookups can still be used under a hash join, but only if there are constant values in the query text (in form of literal or bind variables). If there are no such constant (filter) conditions under a hash join, then the other options to use that index would be to do an INDEX FULL SCAN (which is a range scan from end to end of the index) or INDEX FAST FULL SCAN (which is like a full table scan through the entire index segment). However none of these opportunities give the same benefits as nested loops looking up rows from row source B dynamically based on what was retrieved from A during runtime.
Note that this nested loops benefit isn’t limited to indexes only on table B, the difference is more fundamental than just a specific access path. For example, if table B happens to be a single table hash cluster or indexed X$ table, then the nested loop is also able to do “optimized” lookups from these row-sources, based on the values retrieved from table A.
So, my article with a lot of (loosely) related details is here:
In the comments section of my question, Tom, Bernard Polarski, Christian Antognini and Marc Musette got the closest to what I had in my mind when I asked the question. However, of course your mileage may vary somewhat depending on what kind of problems you have experienced the most over all the years. Also, Jonathan Lewis had a valid comment regarding that the answer depends on what exactly does one mean by “fundamental” and yeah this was open to interpretation.
Nevertheless, I wanted to emphasize that there’s a more important difference between NL and hash joins, than the usual stuff you see in training material which talk about implementation details like hash tables and memory allocation…
Some day I will complete that article, I plan to add some design advice in there, like denormalization opportunities for getting the best of the both worlds etc. But now I’m gonna get a beer instead.
Thanks for reading and answering my blog, I was quite impressed by the volume of comments & answers to my question. I must do this more often!
