Slow sorts in 8i

I'm migrating Oracle 7.3.3 tables into an Oracle 8i db, and I've noticed that the 7.3 db is much faster on a sort than the 8i. As a test I'm using approx. 40K records with eight mixed CHAR, VARCHAR2, and NUMBER columns and ordering on the first column. On the 7.3 db this takes about 6 seconds to start returning data, but on the 8i it takes about four minutes.

My v$parameters are as follows:

SORT_AREA_SIZE = 65536
SORT_AREA_RETAINED_SIZE = 65536
SORT_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT = 16

These are the only v$parameters dealing with sorting that I know of in the v$parameters file. The SGA sizes are similar, as are the other storage parameters. My db block size is 8K in the 7.3 db and 4K in the 8i.

Any ideas on this problem will certainly be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

James Schrumpf
hatteras_at_hotbot.com Received on Tue Sep 28 1999 - 13:21:27 CDT