index blocks reuse

We have the following composite BTree index on a table :

Index Columns:

OrderDate date
OrderNum Number(30).

The table has more than 200 million rows. Thousands of rows in the table are inserted every day. Order Date is the current date and OrderNum starts from 1 every day. The index has grown to more than 10 GBs in size. I have started deleting rows older than 100 days from the table,starting with the oldest record. The deletions are being done in date order starting with the oldest day in the tabl. Rows should get deleted from the index also.

Question is : Will the space in the index be reused after deletion? Since the leaf pages in the index will have ordered data, deleted the data from the table in date order should free up 100 per cent space in such index blocks. Would this space be used automatically for new index data (since there are new insertions to the table daily) or do I have to coalesce/rebuild the index to reuse thus freed space?

Percent free is 10% for the index, and percentage increase for the index extents is zero. Received on Thu Sep 19 2002 - 09:43:28 CDT