VARRAYs

Hi,
1. Does the use of VARRAYs pose any known performance bottleneck? We are developing a system where we pass data to an Oracle stored procedure (Oracle 8.1.7) from the middle layer (Weblogic 5.1) in a multi-tier system and carrying out INSERTs into multiple tables in a loop.

2. When connecting to the DB, we make use of oracle’s thin driver. I was told that the use of OCI to connect to the DB would enhance performance. Is that true?

Thanks in advance