Newbie Oracle ROWID questions

I'm fairly new to Oracle and have been developing with it for the last year. I need to optimize our application we're building (VB 6.0 front end, largely batch process mode) and I have been elected to be the 'Short Order DBA' since I have background in DB2 and Sybase application development. Although our application is small, it has to pass 100,000 + transactions many, many, many times through each run - long story why but it will need to stay that way.

I've looked at and still am looking at the SQL and how used, indexes, etc, etc. I have also read a lot about the Oracle ROWID. Concensus in the literature is that the fastest way to do UPDATES is in using the ROWID. Many of our tables currently use non-unique indexing. I've tried some experiments at it seems to work well.

BUTT - there must be a catch somewhere. What are the pitfalls of using ROWID as a direct access capability to do UPDATES?. We are not migrating this database to another platform (currently MSoft NT/2000), no replication, etc. Pretty run of the mill stuff.

Would appreciate any feedback or insights on this.

Thanks in advance,
Peter Received on Thu May 10 2001 - 11:30:58 CDT