No way could I confirm or deny that what you see is normal since I have never even approached the number of rows you are dealing with. There is some server on-line docs at http://hojohn.photo.net/ora81/DOC/server.815/ that may help.


>HI,
>I am on a project that uses Oracle as backend. I need more knowledge on how to administrate an Oracle Server on Unix. The server we use for development is not well optimised and I would like to help the DBA in is task of fine tuning it.
>
>The project consist of loading a lot of rows (100-500k) in tables several times. These tables after all loads will contain several milions rows of data. The problems we face right now are that it takes an eternity to delete rows that we previously loaded. Since we are not doing any OLTP ( we are actually doing ETL for a datawarehouse) we need to be able to delete the rows loaded very fast and NO we cannot TRUNCATE the tables since we do not want to delete all the data in the tables.
>
>I created a procedure that delete 20K rows at a time and COMMIT at each 20K rows. To delete 4 millions rows, it takes something like 10-12 hours. I assume that it is not normal :-). The server we have has 2 processors and 2GB of ram. There are only 4-5 users that query on this server. Anyway, if somebody knows where I could find any infos (if there is another forum more specialized that this one that I like very much), or books suggestions I would really apreciate it.
>
>Thank you for your help,
>Christian