Explain Plan - Oracle

I never remember how to check out the execution plans on Oracle, so this time I thought I'd blog the answer. Basically, you run the following:

explain plan for

You can then see the results with:

SELECT * FROM TABLE(dbms_xplan.display)

This article gives a lot more detail, as does this. Its a shame Oracle didn't integrate the explain plan output into SQL Plus in a similar way to what Microsoft has done with SQL Analyser.