What are you checking to see the "block" count ? v$sess_io v$sesstat trace file ? You've obviously set up a repeatable test, why not send us the output so that we can see the actual figures, and the execution plan. By the way, if the blevel is two, then an index-only query would have to hit at least three blocks: root, branch, and leaf. The blevel is the number of branch levels, and the height is blevel plus one. Regards Jonathan Lewis http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk The educated person is not the person who can answer the questions, but the person who can question the answers -- T. Schick Jr Next public appearances: Jan 29th 2004 UKOUG Unix SIG - v$ and x$ March 2004 Hotsos Symposium - The Burden of Proof March 2004 Charlotte NC OUG - CBO Tutorial April 2004 Iceland One-day tutorials: http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/tutorial.html Three-day seminar: see http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/seminar.html ____UK___February ____UK___June The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html ----- Original Message ----- From: "Terrian, Tom (Contractor) (DAASC)" <Tom.Terrian@xxxxxxx> To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 9:08 PM 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. -------------------------------------------------------------