Bad performence using DESCENDING with index in ORACLE 7.3

Hi All

One of my customers is having performance problems trying to do a SELECT with a ORDER BY ... DESCENDING on an indexed column. I was once told that pirior to vertion 7.3 oracle had to read the index to a work area, sort it in decending order and than fetch the data, but from ver 7.3 this problem is solved, and the index had backward pointers that enable it to be read in reverse order. My customer said that when he asked, he was told that the problem is solved only from version 8.0.

Can anyone solve this mystry for me?
Is the reverse pointers available from version 7.3 or just from version 8.0?

Thanks

Shaya Received on Thu Sep 23 1999 - 05:42:35 CDT