We have an urgent performance problem where inserting data into an Oracle 9i database using DBI/DBD oracle is at least five times slower than stright sql using sqlplus.

Were this to drop in my lap, the first thing I'd do is make sure that I'm doing an "apples to apples" comparision. I.e., am I really issuing the same stream of requests to Oracle across the wire when using DBI that I am when using SQL*Plus.

In the meantime, can you show us a representative chunk of code that is inserting data?