Question re: ora-1652

I know that I should know the answer, but don't.

Occasionally my alert logs turn up an ora-1652: "unable to extend temp segment by 256 in tablespace SYSTEM." Usually it is the SYSTEM tablespace, less often it is the application data tablespace.

I know that the official fix is to add another file to the tablespace. It also seems that resizing an existing tablespace file upward should also fix the problem.

What I'm fuzzy about is why it's trying to allocate a temporary segment in something other than the temp tablespace. I just double checked the latest occurance of this, and the only user with the SYSTEM ts specified as its temporary ts is SYS.

Just as puzzeling is why this doesn't seem to be causing any problems. That is, we've never gotten a user complaint about anything failing. I'm aware that users will often retry a failed operation and if the failure was due to a transient problem the retry will work. But I see these just often enough that I would expect to be hearing from the user community if it were causing failures at their end.

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Ed Stevens
(Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)