Reclaiming space

I have been working for a long time and I still did not know this. We had a user whose objects were occupying about 2Tb. We dropped the user cascade in the DB to reclaim space on the OS side. I was hoping the user's objects would be dropped and also the space reclaimed. But the space was not reclaimed in the OS. We dont see any object owned by the user in the dba_segments.

More reading up revealed that the space is not released to the OS but is available for future storage for other objects inside the tablespace. If we want to reclaim the space, one option seems to be to reorganize the tablespace. Re-organizing for us may be time consuming and interfere with operations; the whole tablespace is several TB in size. Is there a better way? v12

CP.

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