Sort Areas
Oracle uses the INIT.ORA parameter SORT_AREA_SIZE to allocate memory for use in sorting data. When a sort cannot be completed in memory, Oracle uses temporary segments in the database, which is considerably slower. A careful balance is required for SORT_AREA_SIZE, since large sizes can dramatically increase performance by decreasing I/O, but will also use up memory and can result in paging.
Tip
Remember that this parameter applies to each user process. Each user process performing a sort will have SORT_AREA_SIZE memory allocated. So, if SORT_AREA_SIZE is set to 1 megabyte, and 100 user processes are performing sorts, a total of 100 megabytes of memory may be allocated.
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