Understand that "db file sequential read" just means its not a multi-block read - it's a single block read. Most any time that a single block needs to be retrieved, this event shows up. There are numerous reasons for this: file header block access, space management (bitmap blocks), etc, etc. As I mentioned, it would appear that this event showed up because of extent allocation. Simply put, when doing bulk inserts, the larger the extent, the less frequent the need to get a new extent. Especially important when doing bulk inserts into numerous segments (e.g. 128 hash subpartitions). The rest of the stuff you mention doesn't really matter here that I see. On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Wayne Adams <work@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Thanks for the feedback guys! > > To elaborate, this particular scenario and discussion is partly out of > curiosity (myself trying to understand the "db file sequential read" on > INSERT with no indexes), and partly as a pre-cursor to putting forth a more > concrete INSERT performance problem example very soon. > > To provide some additional info. > > 1) All of these inserts were into the same RANGE partition (we partition by > month), and the test/trace was done after having just inserted 450k rows. > The table has already been dropped, so I can't tell the extent size at the > end, but it probably wasn't 64k. > 2) The table never has any updates or deletes, only inserts. > 3) The table does have the DEGREE set to 4, but we did not issue the "alter > session force parallel dml" clause, so I didn't think it would do any > concurrent inserts. Am I wrong in that? > > I am also puzzled by the high CPU time for the insert. In this example, > it's 75% of the total elapsed time. I have never heard of a high number of > bind variables in an INSERT causing high CPU. The data being passed to the > insert has just been finished being massaged by a bunch of PL/SQL code, so > I'm not sure how would using a GTT in this example help. You would have to > use the binds to insert into the GTT too wouldn't you? -- Regards, Greg Rahn http://structureddata.org -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l