A Faster Insert

Question: I need to speed up some slow running big inserts, what can I do?  Would if help if the table was partitioned?

Well first off, partitioning a table does not make inserts run any faster.   Now if you were trying to improve the performance of deletes, then partitioning would buy you some speed there. So if partitioning isn't the answer what else can you do to help out your slow processing inserts?   

Are you doing any joins withing the insert code to generate the data you are using for the inserts?  If you are, then that would be a good place to take a long hard look.  As often that can very will be a large part of the issue.  It is important to know what all tables are being joined together.  You might find that you are using a view or two or three within you join conditions; and views are often built on multi-table joins.  You could find yourself joining a larger number of tables together and not even realize it. 

Speaking of joins; You can play with your explain plan (I know you executed one before just throwing some new code out there on the server and letting it run wild consuming resources-) by trying things like a sort merge or maybe a nested loops join instead of hash join (which don't seem to be the best choice when doing inserts as it tends to execute much slower).

Some more basic first-line type of things you can do to help with insert speeds are:

-Ensure an appropriate parallel degree setting for the table.

1.     -Alter session enable parallel dml.

2.      -Add the /*+ append */ hint.  Note that this hint will increase your insert speed, but it will also increase your table fragmentation over time. Therefore, you will need to keep an eye on your table and rebuild it as needed.

3.