duplicate-index-names danger

I just discovered an index-naming problem I wasn't aware of, and I wanted to know if any of you knew of a reason why Oracle allows this:

It seems (in 9i, at least) that you can create two indexes having the same name, on the same table (owned by the same table owner), but covering different columns, as long as the indexes have different *index* owners. The result is certainly confusing, but more seriously, from my perspective, it makes index() hints in the SQL ambiguous, since these appear to have no way to refer to the index owner, only to the table and to the index name. This ability to create indexes under owners other than the table owner smells to me like a case of Oracle giving us rope to hang ourselves with, without any really compelling need for that rope.

Have any of you ever run into a really good reason why you might actually *need* to create an index owned by an owner other than the table owner???

I can certainly believe that it is convenient for some central, privileged owner to create indexes on tables owned under other schemas, so I'm not saying that should be prevented - I am really just asking of there is any reason for the indexes created in this way to not just automatically be assigned ownership in the table-owning account? What do cross-owned indexes (indexes owned by an account other than the table owner) buy us other than trouble, if anything?

Thanks,

Dan Tow
650-858-1557
www.singingsql.com

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