Performance of BEQ v IPC protocol

I have an application which select around 2 million rows from a table. The application runs on the same host as the Oracle instance. I currently have a performance problem with this application and utlbstat/utlestat shows as I expected that Oracle spends a lot of time waiting from SQL*Net message from client.

The natural way to improve this would be to change the application to use the array interface. However I do not have access to the source code as it is a third-party product. The supplier has committed to resolving this but in the next release available in 6 months time.

In the meantime I am trying to improve the performance in other ways. One possibility is via the use of the bequeth driver (BEQ) as opposed to the IPC driver that I am currently using.

My questions are:

1. Am I right in assuming that as BEQ is based on UNIX pipes it will be faster that IPC which uses sockets?
2. Why is there so little documentation available on the BEQ protocol? Is there a good reason why Oracle do not want its users to use BEQ?
3. I have noticed that there is a RAW protocol diver. Does anyone know what this is for?

thanks
Ciaran Harron Received on Thu Oct 26 2000 - 03:02:20 CDT