OK it seems to work just about as fast as the query with no file path at all. The file path itself causes more output to /dev/null and for 100 files 15 folders deep that's a long string, and my average execution time is more like 0.05 than 0.04 seconds without the file path at all.
But 40-50 milliseconds is pretty damned fast!
Good job.
I didn't test the .LRN portlet nor Oracle at this point - I have Oracle running on my Mac OS X laptop but haven't got it running with AOLserver yet. Maybe it's time to dive into that. Meanwhile, can someone else test Ola's change with Oracle?