Tom, obviously there are many deleted entries in your index. Probably the index key is updated frequently. Recently I made a some tests on a table with only one row and I created an index with all columns. Without index access reading one row from one block took constantly 7 LIO. When using index access I reduced it to 1 block as supposed. But after 1000 updates the LIO was 48 blocks (only index scan). Maybe this explains also your case. Regards, Joze -----Original Message----- From: Terrian, Tom (Contractor) (DAASC) [mailto:Tom.Terrian@xxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 10:08 PM To: 'oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: [oracle-l] Index block count I have a b-tree, unique, local, prefixed, range partitioned index. The blevel on all of the partitions is 2. There are no chained/migrated rows in the table. I have a query that selects 1 record and only uses the index. I am not sure why the query uses 4 blocks. I would think that it would just have to use 1 for the branch block and 1 for the leaf block. Can someone explain it to me? (I have run the query 8,000 times and the average blocks per execution is 4.1) Thanks, Tom ------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -------------------------------------------------------------