According to an answer in this thread, semicolons are bad and should be avoided. I realized this firsthand after spending hours trying to figure out why my queries were running so terribly slow in SQL Developer. After removing the semicolon from the end of a complex query, it finished in a matter of seconds (compared to me just giving up on it after several minutes, which was the case before removing the semicolon). This behavior startled me, and a Google search didn’t turn up much as to when and why I should or should not use semicolons in my SQL statements. Can anyone clear this up with a brief explanation?
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It’s not the semicolon. Rerunning the same query meant that the rows were already cached, so you got them back much faster.