How Smart Scan Queries Work

Smart Scan, like most Oracle technology enhancements, works transparently. A query that can benefit from Smart Scan in the Exadata environment will use the feature without any changes or tuning. But the way that the data is requested and returned to the database server is significantly different from the way these tasks are accomplished with a standard query, resulting in potentially large performance gains for eligible queries. Smart Scan techniques can work on individual tables as well as tables that will be used in a join.