Oracle9.2: Data segment compression bug

It seems that when a table is created with COMPRESS attribute and then populated via conventional INSERT, the compression does not work. However, if a table is populated via direct load insert (using SQL*Loader or /*+ APPEND */ hint), then compression works.
This can be seen from the fact that the segment size is approx. twice smaller (table consists of multiple small extents of the same size).

After a table is created, then
ALTER TABLE name MOVE COMPRESS;
will compress it no matter how it was created.

The happens for both partitioned and non-partitioned tables and locally managed and dictionary-managed tablespaces.

Environment:
Sun Solaris 8
Oracle 9.2.0.2.0 (32bit), 16k blocks Received on Thu Nov 14 2002 - 23:42:57 CST