Indexes, Extents, Performance

My understanding is that having a table with multiple extents does not adversely affect performance if you are accessing the table via RowId (via an index), but it would if you were doing a table scan.

My question is Under what conditions will index performance suffer if the index has multiple extents?

Since we don't have indexes on indexes, I assume that an index can only be accessed via a "table scan" (or maybe the term is an "index scan"), so from that I would deduce that index performance is tied to the number of extents in the index.

Is this too simple an explanation? I'd love to hear from anyone that has experience with this, or can explain performance tuning on the index itself.

Thanks.

Lyle

-- 
Lyle D. Brooks
brooks_at_cais.com

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