Ram, Jonathan Lewis has a good blogpost about this: http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/first_rows_n/. Randolf Geist has also done a presentation on FIRST_ROWS (actually FIRST_ROWS_n to be precise) on last year's UKOUG. In essence: a) general advise is to use ALL_ROWS, unless your system generally only uses the first rows the query returns. Most systems use the entire query resultset. b) if you already have your system running on FIRST_ROWS, a change of optimizer mode will impact your entire system, so not just change it. frits On Jul 6, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Ram K wrote: > Listers, > > We have a new 11g based hybrid application that a third party vendor is > configuring. We observe some slowness in the response times. I do not see any > slow sql in v$sql. The vendor is recommending that we set the OPTIMIZER_MODE > to FIRST_ROWS to get better response times, among other parameter changes. I > have read in few sources that FIRST_ROWS is not generally used, with oracle > itself using ALL_ROWS. Can anyone advise? > > -- > Thanks, > Ram. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l