Roy Lambert wrote:

>  my second thought was "that implies normal tables do write to disk when not absolutely necessary"

Indeed, I think there is a difference. With a standard table, you want it on disk as soon as sensible. Persistence etc.
But a temporary table can stay in memory and not worry about saving to disk - if the server goes kaput then no one cares. So it can take the attitude that it will only write to disk if it needs a buffer for some other purpose.

--

Matthew Jones

Matthew



>Indeed, I think there is a difference. With a standard table, you want it on disk as soon as sensible. Persistence etc.

But that's absolutely necessary <vbg>

Roy