How do I load the Oracle schema into memory instead of the hard drive?

Question

I have a certain web application that makes upwards of ~100 updates to an Oracle database in succession. This can take anywhere from 3-5 minutes, which sometimes causes the webpage to time out. A re-design of the application is scheduled soon but someone told me that there is a way to configure a "loader file" which loads the schema into memory and runs the transactions there instead of on the hard drive, supposedly improving speed by several orders of magnitude. I have tried to research this "loader file" but all I can find is information about the SQL* bulk data loader. Does anyone know what he's talking about? Is this really possible and is it a feasible quick fix or should I just wait until the application is re-designed?

Answer 1

Oracle already does it's work in memory - disk I/O is managed behind the scenes. Frequently accessed data stays in memory in the buffer cache. Perhaps your informant was referring to "pinning" an object in memory, but that's really not effective in the modern releases of Oracle (since V8), particularly for table data. Let Oracle do it's job - it's actually very good at it (probably better than we are). Face it - 100K updates is going to take a while.