Indentifying Redundant Indexes

Dear List,

Firstly - Merry Christmas to those who have not already departed for the holiday season.

I'm currently doing some investigation based around indexes and would like everyone's opinion: What is everyone's preferred approach to identify redundant (as in "never used by Oracle") indexes? I believe Oracle 9 might have a feature to set a flag on objects and then check back later to see if they have been accessed however we're still stuck on 8.1.7.4 (Solaris). Some of my thoughts include:

• Can query for physical disk i/o at a tablespace level easily, however more difficult to go to an object level.
• Could create a trace file and then inspect explain plans for existence of index accesses, however trace file probably not practical to capture for a long period of time.
• Ideal statistic would be something along the lines of "index x used y times in last 24 hours", however a simple "index x was used in the last 24 hours" would be ok.

Obviously we are searching for indexes to remove and identifying those which aren't queried over a set period of time would be good candidates for a starting point. Any advice you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

     Mark.

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Author: Mark Richard
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