Oracle slower than MS Access?

I'm experiencing a surprising performance discrepancy between Oracle and Access.

I have a VB app that writes records to a database. It writes an SQL string such as "INSERT INTO MyTable VALUES('BLAH', 'BLAH', 'BLA'.....);

No triggers, no stored procedures, nothing fancy, just a simple INSERT query. The data is coming from a flat file parsed into records by my VB code

The actual structure of the table is somewhat bigger and looks like this:

TAPEFORMAT            VARCHAR2(1)
RECTYPE                   VARCHAR2(1)
RECNUMBER             VARCHAR2(9)
UNITSEP1                   VARCHAR2(1)
SEARCHCODE          VARCHAR2(10)
SORTGROUP             VARCHAR2(1)
STACKERBYTE         VARCHAR2(1)
SELECTPOLYBAG    VARCHAR2(1)
MAKEUPCODE          VARCHAR2(4)
UNITSEP2                   VARCHAR2(1)
SELCODE                  VARCHAR2(7)
LINE1                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE2                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE3                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE4                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE5                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE6                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE7                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE8                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE9                           VARCHAR2(112)
LINE10                         VARCHAR2(112)
LINE11                         VARCHAR2(112)

Now here's where the confusion lies. when I run this app against an Oracle database it will insert about 2,000 records per minute on average over the course of 400,000 records. When I run it against a MS Access database, it will insert about 5,000 records per minute !!! Can this right right ?!? Everything else is identical, both tests were performed on the same machine using the same data under the same conditions.

I'm hoping somebody will tell me that I'm doing something wrong as I can't believe that Oracle is intrinsically that much slower than Access.

Thank you for any help or insight you can provide.

Ric Gibson
ric.gibson_at_bpc.com
215.679.4451 ext. 2266 Received on Wed Sep 30 1998 - 15:59:06 CDT