Re: Growth of Index

I'm interested in the observation that an index will grow if records are added on one side of the index. I have one byte indexes on 1 million row tables that continue to grow and grow. These indexes are generally yes/no columns: a number of rows get created with an 'N' and then are updated to a 'Y' when the record is further processed, hence a huge number of 'Y' records are created in the index. Is this lopsided updating the reason for my index growth?

Rebuilding the index helps for awhile but is it reasonable for a one byte index on a 1 million row table to be 20M in size? I'm still struggling with the oracle 7 admin manual's index size calculation formula.

Rock Tope, dba
Albuquerque Technical-Vocational Institute Albuquerque, New Mexico
rock_at_tvi.cc.nm.us
srtope_at_aol.com
Oracle 7.1.3
NCR 3555 Received on Mon Jul 24 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST