This is as far as i understand:

When you make a connection to Oracle, the fetchsize determines the amount of data that is transmitted in each round trip from the server to the client.

Meaning, if you have a 3MB dataset and the fetchsize is 500kb, there will be 6 separate transactions to send the data (6 x 500kb = 3000kb = 3MB).

There are also annoying separate fetch parameters for LOBs but i wasnt even bothering you about that.

The idea was, basically, to try to speed things up.

Often, when we run a query at sqlplus, we get the result back in .1ms, when we run it on dbforge, we get the result back in 7seconds. Thats a 70,000x difference and I wanted to see if we could narrow that gap somewhat.