Perf. degradation due to TIMESTAMP WITH TZ

We have an application that loads millions of records into a table. Around 10 fields in this record are date fields. We perform the insert using SQL*Loader in direct path mode. The loading takes a few hours. Recently we had to convert the date columns to TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE(3). After doing the appropriate changes in the SQL*Loader control file, when we performed a load, we experienced a performance degradation of 50%.

Is the slowdown inherently due to the type of the column? Can somebody provide any suggestions for reducing the slowdown?

Thanks
Yash Received on Tue Jan 13 2004 - 14:23:19 CET