Re: When should one rebuild an index?

"Mladen Gogala" <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:gjdbrc$ivs$10_at_solani.org...
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:43:52 -0600, Bob Jones wrote:
>
>> Yes, it is very application dependent. Index rebuilds often yield
>> different results in different situations.
>
> And index rebuilds can hit a bug and yield "invalid rowid" error, as
> reported by J. Lewis.
>

It's not so much a bug as a design defect that could be quite hard to code around given it's connection with cross-DDL read-consistency - see http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/index-rebuild/ for anyone who hasn't seen the problem before.

And there are cases where indexes fairly obviously need some sort of housekeeping - and often you don't need to run any query against them to know that they are going to run into trouble, e.g. http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/index-analysis/

-- 
Regards

Jonathan Lewis
http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com

Author: Cost Based Oracle: Fundamentals
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/cbo_book/ind_book.html

The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html