A lot of unnecessary queries are executed by the clusterfilehandler backend driver for Oracle.

The attached patched version tries to improve performance by:

• switching connect to pconnect to avoid wasting time on a new oracle connection every time
• removing every select count before doing a delete
• removing every select count before doing a fetch - all that might be impacted are warning messages a little bit less explicative
• do not fetching blob data out of the db when doing an object copy

btw: is there an ini param that should dictate behaviour regarding connect vs. pconnect?