coordinate my OracleDB with a foreign OracleDB: time-problem

Hi ng,

At first I have to explain the situation a bit:

There is an Oracle9.2i DB, that contains information about trees on roads, I call it now MyDB.
There is another Oracle9.2i DB, that contains information about roads and objects on it. (It was a hard job to get permission to select data from there). In later Versions there will be implemented an official web- interface with XML- Datasets, that I have to use as even as it exists.
I will call this DB OtherDB. I definitely will not get any help from its developers, they postpone me to the next version. [1]

On MyDB works a Windows-Program written in Delphi6 by ODAC- direct- ACCESS
(http://www.crlab.com/)

In an overnight process I want/have to:
1. Connect to MyDB
2. kill Data in old "CopyTable"

3. connect to OtherDB
4. copy all data from a view in OtherDB into MyDB -> CopyTable
5. disconnect from OtherDB

6. something to be done in MyDB

My questions relate to steps 3-5. (These steps have to be changed with next version of OtherDB, but I can not wait) For this OvernightProcess I wrote another D6- App. The amount of records is about 500 000. At the moment only these steps take about an hour. This seems to be very long for me and is fairly in time. I know that you probably cant tell my where I lose my time, but I hope you can tell me where and how to search! (It is easy to pick the times from each procedure in the D6-App, but so I only can decide which of the DBs takes how much time. What it is doing with this I can not find out that way.

Related part of Application (Delphi- stuff, pseudo):

prepare a query on OtherDB (TOraQuery, seems to be something like an open cursor)
connect to a table in MyDB (TOraTable)
while not OtherDB.OraQuery.eof do begin
  MyDB.OraTable.Insert;
  CopyData(OtherDB.OraQuery.ActiveRecord -> MyDB.OraTable.ActiveRecord);   MyDB.OraTable.Post;
  OtherDB.OraQuery.NextRecord;
end;

Questions:
1.) 500 000 rows in 1 hour, is this too slow or is not 2.) in Oracle there it is not 1 long operation but 500 000 small. How to find out what happens
3.) Can I find out on MyDB, what takes time? (Writing redologs, undo, indexes etc.)

Many thanks
(and a happy new year to all)

Andreas Mosmann

[1]
MyDB ran on a 4 processors- server
OtherDB ran on a 2 processor- server
D6-App ran on a 2GHz- Workstation that was not really busy with this
(10%?)

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