Questions about PARALLEL

From: <Srini.Chavali_at_Cummins.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:41:18 -0500
Message-Id: <10696.123323@fatcity.com>

Listers,

I have a few questions about CREATE TABLE/INDEX ..... PARALLEL. I have not used this before and one of our developers had some questions about this option. The doco I have read so far is not too helpful. I am hoping somebody out there who is using this can help !

What I know is that this option sets degree of parallelism on tables/indexes so queries can be optimized automatically by Oracle based on resources available.
My questions are -
1. Does this feature need any special install options or init.ora parameters ?
2. From what I have read so far, the parallelism feature will only be used for FTS - queries that use indexes will automatically be serialized. True ? 3. If a query does use indexes, the PARALLEL hint will force a FTS and thus take advantage of the parallel option. True ? 4. Any gotchas in using this feature ?

Our environment will be 8.1.6 or 8.1.7 on a multi-processor Digital Unix box for this instance.
All input is appreciated. I will summarize and post findings.

Thanks !

Srini Chavali
Oracle DBA Received on Thu Nov 30 2000 - 08:41:18 CST