alter table split partition optimized in oracle 9i?

Hello Everybody:

I have been reading a part in the Oracle 9i admin's guide stating that oracle is now optimizing the split partition and split subpartition commands if one of the new partitions ends up being empty (and some other conditions are satisfied -
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96521.pdf page 588). Someone from my team however
had to go through a split like that which took about 30 hours.

I have also been running this kind of a split when an existing partition is split in two and one (or even both) partition is empty and this command does not seem to run too quickly (I am using oracle 10.2.0.1)

alter table cfr01.APR_DTL split partition APR_DTL_MAXVALUE   AT ( 2009, 02 )
  INTO ( PARTITION YR_2009_MO_01, PARTITION APR_DTL_MAXVALUE        );

Table altered.

Elapsed: 00:03:35.75

What I do here is taking an empty partition and split it into two other empty partitions. I take all the default storage parameters so I think this command should qualify for an optimized split operation yet I don't think this is the case. I don't see why this should have taken 3.3 min to split an empty partition into two.

Does anyone have any insight into that?

thank you

Gene Gurevich

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