Meta ability (dynamism) will generally have an average performance penalty. If you want speed, you hard-code more up front. Meta-ability generally is best for a

Meta ability (dynamism) will generally have an average performance penalty. If you want speed, you hard-code more up front. Meta-ability generally is best for ad-hoc and short-term uses. One performance trick is for the query optimizer assume the calculation will be the same as the last time the same query or sub-query was issued, and simply dump the results and start over if that assumption is false. If it keeps having to dump, then it assumes you are editing a lot and stops guessing for a day or so. (You could issue an optimizer command to resume guessing if need be.)