Quite interesting 11.2.0.4 performance problem.

In case anyone runs into this problem I thought I'd share it. We have some code that ran fine on Oracle 11.2.0.1 in about 30 minutes - when we moved to
11.2.0.4 it took over 3 hours.
It wrote 3/4 million rows to a temp table then wrote it to disk. Using UTL_FILE

Nothing in the traces no tuning fiddling with spin count, moving disks, analyzing tables, watching spotlight for hours, nothing helped.

Eventually our developer tried to reproduce the problem and discovered there was no commit after writing the temp table. Adding a commit returned the speed to what we used to get. I agree "commit little and often" is or should be a developer's mantra - along with "beware of nulls". However clearly some behaviour in a temporary buffer has been changed. But I ackknowledge that the code was 'wrong' in the first place.

-- 
Howard A. Latham
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l