Poor perfmance after large delete

We had been testing our database setup with sample data and decided to try and go live. The main table had 1.4 million rows, which I deleted by doing a series of DELETE FROM WHERE statements (I tried to truncate the table, but Oracle said there were constraints even after I disabled them all, but that is another problem). After about 2 hours the main tables were empty so I went in and did a SELECT COUNT(*) to make sure. It took almost 3 minutes for the result to come back! It took less than 2 seconds when the table was full!

I have rebuilt the primary key and the unique keys using ALTER INDEX ... REBUILD. I have also coalesced the tablespace to make sure any extra extents were freed. I even executed the analyze_schema procedure to update the dictionary. Nothing seems to help.

Anybody know what is going on? I called Oracle but have yet to hear back from them (it has been 3 days now). I am afraid to start loading production data if the performance is going to be this bad.

Version is Workgroup Server 7.3.2.2.1 on NT 4.0 w/service pack 1 installed. Any help would really be appreciated.

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Mark Wagoner
mwagoner_at_medplus.com (work)
mwagoner_at_iac.net     (life)