Troubleshooting Oracle Performance, Second Edition

Direct-Path Insert

Oracle Database provides two ways for loading data into a table (provided it’s not stored in a cluster): conventional inserts and direct-path inserts. Conventional inserts, as the name suggests, are the ones that are generally used. Direct-path inserts are used only when the database engine is explicitly instructed to do so. The aim of direct-path inserts is to efficiently load large amounts of data (they can have poorer performance than conventional inserts for small amounts of data). They’re able to achieve this goal because their implementation is optimized for performance at the expense of functionality. For this reason, they’re subject to more requirements and restrictions than conventional inserts. In this section, I ...