–Tim

Indexes and tables do NOT need separating **for performance reasons** (which was the original myth). If you would like to separate them for administrative or personal reasons, feel free, but it won’t make a blind bit of difference to the performance of anything. Which is, indeed, the conclusion Ault laboriously comes to… but in a way which might fool some people into thinking the old myth about performance benefits is actually true.

And the use of multiple blocksizes as a performance tuning technique merely complicates database management whilst simultaneously manageing to potentially introduce some very nasty performance bottlenecks (no ASMM, no KEEP/RECYCLE caches for the non-default blocksize caches, increasing contention for large blocks, etc etc). Meanwhile, Ault’s article makes no attempt to prove that multiple blocksizes improves performance. He merely asserts that it does and quotes someone else asserting that it does… but there’s no attempt to discriminate, for example, between the effects of the new block size and the effects of the one-off reorganisation of segments which the use of the new block sizes mandated.

Ault’s work you cite, therefore, is not myth-busting but rather falls into the category of half-truth or outright error you go on to mention.