MAXTRANS in indexes

Oracle doesn't do page-level locking, but this MAXTRANS limit is almost as bad. You have to permanently allocate space in each page for concurrent transaction accesses, and lock out transactions when this overflows.

Isn't this an enormous problem, particularly on indexes? Lets say that I am indexing a table on a sequence-generated field. By definition, all inserts will be clustered into the last leaf of the index. Therefore it would seem that I need INITRANS = entries/leaf to avoid lockouts. At 23 bytes/tran, this means about half the index is wasted on transactions! THis then doubles the IO to this index.

And I can't double the block size for this index to compensate, because Oracle only supports a single global permanent block size, which is a severe limitation in its own right.

Is this analysis correct?

-- 
Jonathan Edwards				edwards_at_intranet.com
IntraNet, Inc					617-527-7020