At 09:52 AM 11/12/2002 +1100, Alan McDonald wrote:

>if you pull [all 1.5 million records] in as one select, then I don't
>call it a simple process. You are pulling the entire database off
>the disk into memory which means it's going back on to the disk as disk
>buffer, pretty useless exercise...

No, not exactly. At least that's not what the database does. The
database keeps some finite number of pages buffers in its cache.
As it scans through the data, it reads pages into buffers. When
all buffers are full, it releases and reuses the least recently
used buffer. The operation, if I understood, was read only for
the database, so the least recently used page is just overwritten
in memory - not flushed to disk.

>I
>would expect the database to more than tripl in size under this procedure
>since there would be so much garbage... maybe you are running out of
>diskspace too :-)

In theory, there was no update thus no garbage and no growth...



Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
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