oops, forgot to mention that I've seen 3,000,000+ 64byte rows per second inserted on a 4 node PolyServe cluster attached to IBM Totalstorage SAN...with mid 90s% scalability from 1 to 4 nodes so External Tables do keep the DML thumping... it is just SQL*Loader under the covers after all. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
