Christian and Fred, In all cases, Oracle does not allowcate any buffer for you, you do it in your program. eg. in a pl/sql, if you do a select into bulk collect ...limit X.... then PL/SQL allocates the buffers for the tables, and oracle send as much data as requested (i.e. X rows). In a Pro*C/OCI program, you allocate the number of rows that you want to fetch (i.e. the array size), and Oracle will send to your program that many rows. The FIRST_ROWS hint will only influence CBO, but has nothing to do with buffer allocation. regards On 4/25/06, Christian Antognini <Christian.Antognini@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Fred > > >Does anyone know how big the first_rows buffer is? (If I use the hint, > how > >does Oracle determine how much data to bring back to me initially?) > > Mhmm... Do you mean the optimizer mode FIRST_ROWS? > > If yes, it's only an optimization goal, not the size of a buffer. > If no, please, explain what do you mean... > > > HTH > Chris > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > >