My first experience with Oracle (this was a long time ago, and I suspect they didn't even call it EXPLAIN). Anyway, I found it significantly better and clearer

My first experience with Oracle (this was a long time ago, and I suspect they didn't even call it EXPLAIN). Anyway, I found it significantly better and clearer than the EXPLAIN output from Postgres or MySQL. There was a query being emitted by the anti-fraud software of a certain well-known US bank, that was taking 45 minutes to run, which didn't please the fraud team. This fraud team weren't highly-paid elites; they were drudge workers, as much at risk of burnout as anyone. Anyway, I was tasked with fixing this (low-importance) problem. I managed to figure out what the problem was with the query, with the help of EXPLAIN. I reconstructed the query so it ran in less than 10 seconds, and submitted the patch. It took two months for the DBAs to let me add the requisite index to production. They'd given me a copy of the production database, eventually, so I could test my change, and make sure it didn't break anything else; but they still held it back. DBAs were very anally-retentive in those days. I got no credit for that (except from myself :-). I'm happy to pat myself on the back for reducing the query time from absurd to reasonable, and by a factor of 1/270. I've never used Oracle since, by the way; it's always looked to me like a blind alley. But $FINCORP used to like Oracle, and the Oracle DBAs were treated like ghodz.