Pre-fetch parameters with Oracle

Pre-fetch parameters allow an application to automatically fetch rows from the Oracle database when opening a cursor.

Before version 2.00, the default pre-fetch parameters are 50 rows and 65535 bytes for the pre-fetch buffer. Some customers experienced a huge memory usage with those default values, when using a lot of cursors: It appears that the Oracle client is allocating a buffer of pre-fetch.memory (i.e. 64 Kbytes) for each cursor.

Starting with version 2.00, the default is 10 rows and 0 (zero) bytes for the pre-fetch buffer (memory), meaning that memory is not included in computing the number of rows to pre-fetch.