Christian, The third point you made might be relevant here. There's pretty much no other activity on this instance; maybe the buffer cache is filled with blocks from this table, and Oracle just reads in single blocks as needed. I suppose that's more efficient than reading in the same blocks over and over in multi-block reads. Paul On 5/20/05, Christian Antognini <Christian.Antognini@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Paul >=20 > >Why in the world would Oracle be reading a block at a time rather than > >performing full-table scans? >=20 > If Oracle recognizes that a single block has to be read, even while execu= ting a full table scan, it performs a db file sequential read. >=20 > Three common situations lead to multi-block reads that are smaller than t= he specified value: > - Oracle reads headers with single-block reads > - Oracle never does an I/O that spans more extents > - Oracle never reads a block that is already in the buffer cache >=20 >=20 >=20 > HTH > Chris >=20 --=20 Paul Baumgartel paul.baumgartel@xxxxxxxxx -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l