SQL Loader / Multithreading option not working?

[chistik]

Hello,

I'm trying to speed up some loads on some rather large flat files that are produced off a mainframe and sent down to a unix box for loading.

These machines are typically AIX boxes with SMT turned on. Oracle Version is 10g.

All these loads are using direct path / with truncate option and we are seeing ~36 hours to load one file that is approximately 260 gigs in size. (This data file is fixed width)

Since these machines are running ~16 CPU's I wanted to test SQL loader with the multithreading=true option.

I'm invoking these loads from a script:

sqlldr / control=${CNAME} errors=0 bad=${BADNAME} log=${LOG}_load data=${DATAFILE} direct=true rows=5000 streamsize=1048576 readsize=1048576 columnarrayrows=8000 multithreading=true

I ran a couple tests (on some much smaller files) but I'm still getting logs that look like:


Total stream buffers loaded by SQL*Loader main thread: 2245
Total stream buffers loaded by SQL*Loader load thread: 0

Why is nothing showing being loaded into the load thread? Is there some option in ora.init / something I am missing here?

In addition to this I am also looking at trying Parallel Direct Path w/ one or multiple files.

Any help is appreciated!

-Kevin