Sqlplus and Large Table Subsetting

The equipment :
Oracle 7.0.16.6.0 running on a dedicated Novell Server with 40MB. Sqlplus 3.1.1.x from either DOS or Windows 3.1

The task:

Create a new table by selecting 2 fields from a very large ( 120,000 recs) table to make a table with only the unique values of those 2 fields.

The attempt:

Create table new_table as select distinct field1,field2 from big_table;

The result :

System failure - Database and server shutdown -- much gnashing of teeth :)

The question :

WHY ? All help gratefully solicited.

I am :

John Greco
Oracle DBA - 6 years Received on Tue Mar 14 1995 - 00:31:13 CET