oracle does full table scan but returns resutls so quickly

Question

When I open up TOAD and do a select * from table,the results (first 500 rows) come back almost instantly. But the explain plan shows full table scan and the table is very huge. How come the results are so quick?

Answer 1

In general, Oracle does not need to materialize the entire result set before it starts returning the data (there are, of course, cases where Oracle has to materialize the result set in order to sort it before it can start returning data). Assuming that your query doesn't require the entire result set to be materialized, Oracle will start returning the data to the client process whether that client process is TOAD or SQL*Plus or a JDBC application you wrote. When the client requests more data, Oracle will continue executing the query and return the next page of results. This allows TOAD to return the first 500 rows relatively quickly even if it would ultimately take many hours for Oracle to execute the entire query and to return the last row to the client.

Answer 2

Toad only returns the first 500 rows for performance, but if you were to run that query through an Oracle interface, JDBC for example, it would return the entire result. My best guess is that the explain plan shows you the results in the case it doesn't get a subset of the records; that's how i use it. I don't have a source for this other than my own experience with it.