Over use of Oracle With Clause?

I'm writing many reporting queries for my current employer utilizing Oracle's With clause to allow myself to create simple steps, each of which is a data oriented transformation, that build upon each other to preform a complex task.

It was brought to my attention today that overuse of the with clause could have negative side effects on the Oracle server's resources.

Can anyone explain why over use of the oracle with clause may cause a server to crash? Or point me to some articles where I can research appropriate use cases? I started using the With clause heavily to add structure to my code and make it easier to understand, I hope with some informative responses here I can continue to use it efficiently.

Thanks!

Remember that the WITH clause is used to name sub-queries, and sub-query logic can be abused somewhat. The overhead for WITH shouldn't end up being much more than using a regular sub-query, but still don't try to have a ridiculous amount of nesting going on. So long as you have a good picture of how deep you're going with things, you should be fine.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#22566, answer score: 8