why it would be horrible for Oracle to make that the "default".

转自asktom上的一个关于Insert /*+ APPEND */ 的讨论

a) it isn't necessarily faster in general. It does a direct path load to disk - bypassing the buffer cache. There are many cases - especially with smaller sets - where the direct path load to disk would be far slower than a conventional path load into the cache. 

b) a direct path load always loads above the high water mark, since it is formatting and writing blocks directly to disk - it cannot reuse any existing space. Think about this - if you direct pathed an insert of a 100 byte row that loaded say just two rows - and you did that 1,000 times, you would be using at least 1,000 blocks (never reuse any existing space) - each with two rows. Now, if you did that using a conventional path insert - you would get about 70/80 rows per block in an 8k block database. You would use about 15 blocks. Which would you prefer? 


c) you cannot query a table after direct pathing into it until you commit. 


d) how many people can direct path into a table at the same time? One - one and only one. It would cause all modifications to serialize. No one else could insert/update/delete or merge into this table until the transaction that direct paths commits. 


Direct path inserts should be used with care, in the proper circumstances. A large load - direct path. But most of the time - conventional path.