Will inserting half a million entries with the same date value be slowed by a non-unique index on that date column?

Question

I have a cursor that selects all rows in a table, a little over 500,000 rows. Read a row from cursor, INSERT into other table, which has two indexes, neither unique, one numeric, one 'DATE' type. COMMIT. Read next row from Cursor, INSERT...until Cursor is empty.

All my DATE column's values are the same, from a timestamp initialized at the start of the script.

This thing's been running for 24 hours, only posted 464K rows, a little less than 10K rows / hr.

Oracle 11g, 10 processors(!?) Something has to be wrong. I think it's that DATE index trying to process all these entries with exactly the same value for that column.

Answer 1

Why don't you just do:

insert into target (columns....) 
select columns and computed values 
from source

commit

?

This slow by slow is doing far more damage to performance than an index that may not make any sense.