■ Cost The cost assigned to each step of the query plan by the CBO. The CBO works by generating many different execution paths/plans for the same query and assigns a cost to each and every one. The query plan with the lowest cost wins. In the full outer join example, we can see the total cost for this query is 10. ■ Card Card is short for Cardinality. It is the estimated number of rows that will flow out of a given query plan step. In the full outer join example, we can see the optimizer expects there to be 327 rows in EMP and 4 rows in DEPT. ■ Bytes The size in bytes of the data the CBO expects each step of the plan to return. This is dependent on the number of rows (Card) and the estimated width of the rows.