Chaining Rows

My environment is Oracle Workgroup Server 7.3.3.0.0 on NT 3.51.

After running an analyze on a certain table, I was faced with the information that of 22491 rows, I have 8944 chains. I do not understand chaining totally, so that me be my problem, but I do not understand how this can be.

My understanding of chaining occuring is when a single record is too large to fit into a single block. By block size is 2K (I know this should be higher, but I am relatively new to this environment and have not addressed this issue yet) and the record size is variable up to 443, with most fields nullable and no LONG datatypes (all number and varchar2). My pctfree and pctused values are 10 and 40. The values from the analyze show up as:

	Num Rows:	22491
	Blocks:		2034
	Empty Blocks:	25
	Avg Space:	649
	Chain count:	8944
	Avg Row Length:	106
	

I do not understand how chaining can be happening? If data is added to a record, replacing a null with a value, is not the record either stored in the current block, or in a new block via row migration? Why am I chaining?         

Respond via E-Mail if possible.         

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