Freeing Tablespace for active table

Hello Folks,

I chanced upon this newsgroup in my search for a solution to a problem I am facing. I hope someone can give me a pointer.

I have a table in an Oracle 8i database that performs the function of a log. It has a hit of approximately 2 records a second. Such a large volume of data eats into our tablespace and we have decided to summarize the data in this table. So we have a function that summarizes the data, inserts it into a new summary table and then frees space on this table.

The problem we face are as follows

1. Mere deletion of records we have discovered does not free the table space. This only happens on Truncate. In order to use the Truncate command we have to drop the entire table rather than delete a select set of records as we need.
2. While we are truncating the table, what happens to the attempts to access this table?

Is there some way to selectively compress or free table space without stopping our operation?

I would be very glad if someone takes a few minutes off and helps us out.

Regards,
Ritu Received on Wed Apr 07 2004 - 15:49:07 CDT