Best Way to Join One Column on Columns From Two Other Tables - sql

Question

I have a schema like the following in Oracle
Section:
+--------+----------+
| sec_ID | group_ID |
+--------+----------+
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 2 |
| 4 | 2 |
+--------+----------+
Section_to_Item:
+--------+---------+
| sec_ID | item_ID |
+--------+---------+
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 2 |
| 2 | 3 |
| 2 | 4 |
+--------+---------+
Item:
+---------+------+
| item_ID | data |
+---------+------+
| 1 | a |
| 2 | b |
| 3 | c |
| 4 | d |
+---------+------+
Item_Version:
+---------+----------+--------+
| item_ID | start_ID | end_ID |
+---------+----------+--------+
| 1 | 1 | |
| 2 | 1 | 3 |
| 3 | 2 | |
| 4 | 1 | 2 |
+---------+----------+--------+
Section_to_Item has FK into Section and Item on the *_ID columns.
Item_version is indexed on item_ID but has no FK to Item.item_ID (ran out of space in the snapshot group).
I have code that receives a list of version IDs and I want to get all items in sections in a given group that are valid for at least one of the versions passed in. If an item has no end_ID, it's valid for anything starting with start_ID. If it has an end_id, it's valid for anything up until (not including) end_ID.
What I currently have is:
SELECT Items.data
FROM Section, Section_to_Items, Item, Item_Version
WHERE Section.group_ID = 1
AND Section_to_Item.sec_ID = Section.sec_ID
AND Item.item_ID = Section_to_Item.item_ID
AND Item.item_ID = Item_Version.item_ID
AND exists (
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT 2 AS version FROM DUAL
UNION ALL SELECT 3 AS version FROM DUAL
) passed_versions
WHERE Item_Version.start_ID <= passed_versions.version
AND (Item_Version.end_ID IS NULL or Item_Version.end_ID > passed_version.version)
)
Note that the UNION ALL statement is dynamically generated from the list of passed in versions.
This query currently does a cartesian join and is very slow.
For some reason, if I change the query to join
AND Item_Version.item_ID = Section_to_Item.item_ID
which is not a FK, the query does not do the cartesian join and is much faster.
A) Can anyone explain why this is?
B) Is this the right way to be joining this sequence of tables (I feel weird about joining Item.item_ID to two different tables)
C) Is this the right way to get versions between start_ID and end_ID?
Edit
Same query with inner join syntax:
SELECT Items.data
FROM Item
INNER JOIN Section_to_Items ON Section_to_Items.item_ID = Item.item_ID
INNER JOIN Section ON Section.sec_ID = Section_to_Items.sec_ID
INNER JOIN Item_Version ON Item_Version.item_ID = Item_.item_ID
WHERE Section.group_ID = 1
AND exists (
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT 2 AS version FROM DUAL
UNION ALL SELECT 3 AS version FROM DUAL
) passed_versions
WHERE Item_Version.start_ID <= passed_versions.version
AND (Item_Version.end_ID IS NULL or Item_Version.end_ID > passed_version.version)
)
Note that in this case the performance difference comes from joining on Item_Version first and then joining Section_to_Item on Item_Version.item_ID.
In terms of table size, Section_to_Item, Item, and Item_Version should be similar (1000s) while Section should be small.
Edit
I just found out that apparently, the schema has no FKs. The FKs specified in the schema configuration files are ignored. They're just there for documentation. So there's no difference between joining on a FK column or not. That being said, by changing the joins into a cascade of SELECT INs, I'm able to avoid joining the entire Item table twice. I don't love the resulting query, and I don't really understand the difference, but the stats indicate it's much less work (changes the A-Rows returned from the inner most scan on Section from 656,000 to 488 (it used to be 656k starts returning 1 row, now it's 488 starts returning 1 row)).
Edit
It turned out to be stale statistics - the two queries were equivalent the whole time but with the incomplete statistics, the DB happened to notice the correct plan only in the second instance. After updating statistics, both queries generated the same plan.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is the best idea but this seems to avoid the cartesian join:
select data
from Item
where item_ID in (
select item_ID
from Item_Version
where item_ID in (
select item_ID
from Section_to_Item
where sec_ID in (
select sec_ID
from Section
where group_ID = 1
)
)
and exists (
select 1
from (
select 2 as version
from dual
union all
select 3 as version
from dual
) versions
where versions.version >= start_ID
and (end_ID is null or versions.version <)
)
)