Headline – if you don’t want to read the note – the /*+ parallel(N) */ hint doesn’t mean a query will use parallel execution, even if there are enough parallel execution server processes to make it possible. The parallel(N) hint tells the optimizer to consider the cost of using parallel execution for each path that it examines, but ultimately the optimizer will still take the lowest cost path (bar the odd few special cases) and that path could turn out to be a serial path.
The likelihood of parallelism appearing for a given query changes across versions of Oracle so you can be fooled into thinking you’re seeing bugs as you test new versions but it’s (almost certainly) the same old rule being applied in different circumstances. Here’s an example – which I’ll start off on 11.2.0.4:
