Optimising Oracle 9i for million-record JDBC read-only access

Hello --

I am trying to optimise a JDBC connection and an Oracle 9i database for reading millions of records at a time to a 1 Gig PC running Win2K or XP. Two questions:

1. Does anyone have suggestions for optimising an Oracle 9i server (Enterprise Edition, Release 2) for networked read-only JDBC access with large return sets? With default settings MySQL reads 1M records 2.5 times faster than Oracle even on its first, non-cached execution.
2. Unrelated question: is there a way to read a text field via JDBC without creating a String object? The memory and GC overheads of creating millions of objects are becoming a problem, too.

Thanks much!
Howie Goodell Received on Tue Jul 13 2004 - 14:49:20 CDT