How can I improve a mostly "degenerate" inner join? - sql

Question

This is Oracle 11g.
I have two tables whose relevant columns are shown below (I have to take the tables as given -- I cannot change the column datatypes):
CREATE TABLE USERS
(
UUID VARCHAR2(36),
DATA VARCHAR2(128),
ENABLED NUMBER(1)
);
CREATE TABLE FEATURES
(
USER_UUID VARCHAR2(36),
FEATURE_TYPE NUMBER(4)
);
The tables express the concept that a user can be assigned a number of features. The (USER_UUID, FEATURE_TYPE) combination is unique.
I have two very similar queries I am interested in. The first one, expressed in English, is "return the UUIDs of enabled users who are assigned feature X". The second one is "return the UUIDs and DATA of enabled users who are assigned feature X". The USERS table has about 5,000 records and the FEATURES table has about 40,000 records.
I originally wrote the first query naively as:
SELECT u.UUID FROM USERS u
JOIN FEATURES f ON f.USER_UUID=u.UUID
WHERE f.FEATURE_TYPE=X and u.ENABLED=1
and that had lousy performance. As an experiment I tried to see what would happen if I didn't care about whether or not a user was enabled and that inspired me to try:
SELECT USER_UUID FROM FEATURES WHERE TYPE=X
and that ran very quickly. That in turn inspired me to try
(SELECT USER_UUID FROM FEATURES WHERE TYPE=X)
INTERSECT
(SELECT UUID FROM USERS WHERE ENABLED=1)
That didn't run as quickly as the second query, but ran much more quickly than the first.
After more thinking I realized that in the case at hand every user or almost every user was assigned at least one feature, which meant that the join condition was always or almost always true, which meant that the inner join completely or mostly degenerated into a cross join. And since 5,000 x 40,000 = 200,000,000 that is not a good thing. Obviously the INTERSECT version would be dealing with many fewer rows which presumably is why it is significantly faster.
Question: Is INTERSECT really the way go to in this case or should I be looking at some other type of join?
I wrote the query for the one that also needs to return DATA similarly to the very first one:
SELECT u.UUID, u.DATA FROM USERS u
JOIN FEATURES f ON f.USER_UUID=u.UUID
WHERE f.FEATURE_TYPE=X and u.ENABLED=1
But it would seem I can't do the INTERSECT trick here because there's no column in FEATURES that matches the DATA column.
Question: How can I rewrite this to avoid the degenerate join problem and perform like the query that doesn't return DATA?

Answer 1

I would intuitively use the EXISTS clause:
SELECT u.UUID
FROM USERS u
WHERE u.ENABLED=1
AND EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM FEATURES f where f.FEATURE_TYPE=X and f.USER_UUID=u.UUID)
or similarly:
SELECT u.UUID, u.DATA
FROM USERS u
WHERE u.ENABLED=1
AND EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM FEATURES f where f.FEATURE_TYPE=X and f.USER_UUID=u.UUID)
This way you can select every field from USERS since there is no need for INTERSECT anymore (which was a rather good choice for the 1st case, IMHO).