Cursor_Sharing

Cursor Sharing	Yes/No	What affects	Bind Peeking
exact	yes	No literal replacement, no change in qry
force	Yes	Yes literal replacement	yes bind peeking
force	No
Similar	Yes	No literal replacement, no change in qry
Similar	No	Yes literal replacement

Application developers should use bind variables in their programs to maximize the reuse

of their previously parsed commands in the shared SQL area. If bind variables are not in use, you

may see many very similar statements in the library cache: queries that differ only in the literal

value in the WHERE clause.

Statements that are identical except for their literal value components are called similar

statements. Similar statements can reuse previously parsed commands in the shared SQL area if

the CURSOR_SHARING initialization parameter is set to FORCE. Use EXACT (the default) if the

SQL statements must match exactly including all literals.