Temporary table will reside in memory as long as it fits sort_area_size. ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Amihay Gonen Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 3:43 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Temporary table vs pl\sql table Hi , I've a process which need to do a lot of processing (summaries) on a large set of data. The main flow is as follow: copy the new rows since last run (up to defined row count) to a temporary table. Run various selects with group by on the temporary table and merge them into summary table. I wander (I will conduct some tests ofcourse ) what type of temporary table will be better: 1) create ... temporary table or ... 2) create type test is table of The first option has more i/o and go throw the buffer cache , but doesn't consume a lot of memory the second option doesn't has I/O but consume more memory for the PGA. Any ideas ?