No, not really – but sometimes the optimizer gets better and gives you worse performance as a side effect when you upgrade. Here’s an example where 11.2.0.4 recognised (with a few hints) the case for a nested loop semi-join and 12c went a bit further and recognised the opportunity for doing a cunning “semi_to_inner” transformation … which just happened to do more work than the 11g plan.
Here’s a data set to get things going, I’ve got “parent” and “child” tables, but in this particular demonstration I won’t be invoking referential integrity:
