SQL Plan Baseline Stability Assessment in Oracle Financial Transaction Systems

Abstract

SQL Plan Baselines are extensively relied upon in Oracle-based financial transaction systems to ensure
stable, predictable execution behavior in high-throughput and strictly regulated environments. Because
even minor plan regressions can propagate into lock contention, delayed ledger postings, or
reconciliation failures, preserving execution plan integrity is essential to maintaining operational
continuity. This study conducts a structured assessment of SQL Plan Baseline stability across changing
data distributions, parameter-sensitive APEX query workloads, and concurrency-intense transaction
conditions. The results show that enforcing baselines effectively prevents optimizer-driven variability
and preserves latency consistency during peak processing intervals. However, the study also finds that
static baselines do not inherently adapt to evolving workload or schema conditions and may degrade
performance if not periodically recalibrated. To address this, a governance-driven approach is proposed,
combining continuous plan monitoring, bind-aware strategy refinement, and controlled baseline
evolution workflows. The findings support the conclusion that SQL Plan Baselines are most robust
when treated as part of an ongoing performance assurance lifecycle, rather than as a one-time tuning
artifact.