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RE: re Rebuilding Indexes in Oracle Apps -- was RE: RE: Separate

From: Hately, Mike (LogicaCMG) <mike.hately_at_nedl.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 09:19:37 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005D363B.20031016091937@fatcity.com>


Correction. Paragraph 4 should begin, "I agree though that index rebuilds are often unnecessary."  

Mike

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 16 October 2003 15:20
To: 'ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com'

All of that is fair enough but the number of rows and the values you've chosen fit the point you wished to prove. The value "5" conveniently fits the range for an existing leaf block with empty space.  

The facts as I understand them are this : Index space freed by deleted entries can be reused ( by subsequent transactions ) so long as the indexed value 'belongs' in the leaf block which has free space.
Index leaf blocks are only placed back on the free list when they are empty of entries.  

This means that given a constantly incrementing index value no free space will be reused unless whole index blocks are emptied by deletes. This is fine for working tables which are constantly filled and (totally) emptied but it can lead to large indexes for tables which preserve small amounts os data across the range of keys. Such monotonically increasing key values are pretty common in my experience.  

I agree though that index rebuilds are often necessary. For a while now we've had useful commands like coalesce that could combine logically adjacent, sparsely populated leaf blocks at far less cost than a rebuild.  

Regards,
Mike Hately  

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 16 October 2003 14:29
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hi Rafiq,  

I haven't been receiving all the mail from this list so I don't know the full thread and it doesn't appear a mail I sent a few days ago regarding all this ever made it so I could be wasting my time again. But everytime I see comments as in the above, a voice in my head says "do something, do something". So I'll try again.  

Having lots of deletes and inserts of course doesn't necessarily mean fragmentation. These so-called holes are fully re-usable and in the vast majority of cases results in no substantial issues. Having lots of deletes, inserts and updates rarely requires the index to be rebuilt.  

Simple little demo for any newbies or those force-fed Oracle myths since child birth ...    

<demo snipped on space grounds - Mike Hately>  

With few exceptions (the key is picking those rare cases), index rebuilds are redundant, wasteful and can actually be "detrimental" to performance.  

Cheers  

Richard  



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Author: Hately, Mike (LogicaCMG)
  INET: mike.hately_at_nedl.co.uk

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