direct path

This is just a short note about one of the potential side-effects of the new Auto Degree Of Parallelism (DOP) feature introduced in 11.2.

If you happen to have Parallel DML enabled in your session along with Auto DOP (and here I refer to the PARALLEL_DEGREE_POLICY = AUTO setting, not LIMITED) then it might take you by surprise that INSERT statements that are neither decorated with a parallel hint nor use any parallel enabled objects can be turned into direct-path inserts.