title: Query taking more time to execute if negative number in where clause
body: <p>We have a query in our application, which is having the data of Latitude and Longitude of various cities.</p>
  
  <p>when we pass +ve number as the parameter in Where clause it works fine. but the performance degrades if we pass -ve number.</p>
  
  <pre><code>select * 
  from ADDRESS 
  where Longititude BETWEEN 30 AND 42 ;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>this performs good</p>
  
  <p>but the following performs bad:</p>
  
  <pre><code>select * 
  from ADDRESS 
  where Longititude BETWEEN -74 AND -73;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>can someone point out if there is any setting/NLS parameter of the database to be set to have this perform better?</p>
  
  <p>The database is Oracle 11.2.0.3</p>