Oracle 8 fet$ table questions

I have a partitioned table in Oracle 8.0.4.3.0 that contains 2 - 3 billion rows. The Min and Next Extent size is 128K. The table contained over 2000 partitions when we decided it was time to purge some old data. I wrote a script to drop around 1000 partitions using alter table xxx drop partition yyy. The scripts ran smoothly for a while until I noticed the drops were taking longer and longer.

Our DBA found that there were over 180K rows in the fet$ table. He started performing tablespace coalesce to combine the 128K extents into larger extents. This took almost a day. To try and speed things up he analyzed the fet$ table which I have read is a very bad thing. After telling the DBA that this was not recommended by Oracle, he removed the statistics. We are now at 7500 rows in the fet$ table, but things are still slow. A query against dba_free_space which used to be sub second now takes about 30 seconds.

What can be done to fix the slow query/ddl manipulation? We would like to avoid having to rebuild the database.

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Brent Collins
SC CIM Equipment Productivity Services
Texas Instruments
brent_at_ti.com