Speeding up Index Creation - question

Greetings from an Oracle DBA-in-the-making

My question has to do with speeding up the process of creating indexes.

I have several tables which contain between 1 and 4 million rows each. I am creating indexes on single columns and in some cases on 2 columns. Oracle seem to take an inordinate amount of time to create these indexes - compared to loading the data for instance.

Example: On a table with 4 million rows it took Oracle 25 minutes to create an index on a single column which is varchar2(4).

Is this normal??

The Oracle documentation offers the following 2 suggestions for decreasing time to create indexes but I haven't seen any benefit from either:

1. I have tried bumping up the SORT_AREA SIZE to 2M then to 10M then
2. to 20M with no noticeable difference.
3. I have also tried creating a new TEMP Tablespace of 200M with extents that are 10M - this also showed no performance increase.

Any help would be appreciated

Regards

Rory Skelly
skellyr_at_kgh.kari.net Received on Wed Feb 05 1997 - 00:00:00 CST