On Jul 4, 2007, at 2:31 PM, Jan Wieck wrote:

> What I see here is that we are trying to come up with a special  
> case optimization for mass-deletes. No mass insert or update  
> operations will benefit from any of this. Do people do mass deletes  
> that much that we really have to worry about them?

I do mass deletes twice monthly to prune out old data.  Usually  
several tens of millions of rows.  On the origin it looks like  
'delete from XXX where object_id=N' which cascade deletes via FK  
relationships to gazillions of rows.