The EXPLAIN PLAN statement displays execution plans chosen by the Oracle optimizer for SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements. A statement's execution plan is the sequence of operations Oracle performs to run the statement.

It shows the following information in a statement:

• Ordering of the tables
• Access method
• Join method for tables
• Data operations ( filter, sort, or aggregation)
• Optimization ( cost and cardinality of each operation)
• Partitioning (set of accessed partitions)
• Parallel execution (distribution method of join inputs)