Continuing in the inspiration instilled into me by Dominic Brooks’ post on SQL Plan Management choices, I decided to picture the Oracle CBO behavior in presence of enabled and accepted SPM plan(s) baseline:
The right part of the picture, when triggered, demonstrates the parsing penalty you will have to pay before running your SQL query. Particularly when there are multiple accepted and enabled SPM plans the CBO has to try reproducing and costing all of them before making its final decision. The picture also shows that under all circumstances the CBO will start first by compiling its execution plan as if it is not constrained by any SPM plan. This clearly demonstrates that if your query is suffering from a hard parsing execution time (when the plan generation takes a lot of time) then SPM will not help you. This is where the mantra “When you can hint it then Baseline it” ceases to be accurate.
Mohamed Houri’s Oracle Notes 