Index Internals

Bitmap Indexes have a bad reputation with regard to being problematic and suffering from severe degradation following heavy DML operations, especially larger amounts of insert activity. Bitmap indexes have been known to grow substantially and require periodic rebuilds following such insert activity. While this was certainly the case in previous versions of Oracle, things have dramatically improved since version 10g. [...]

As I’ve discussed previously, a Bitmap index can be considered over a B-tree index (where concurrent DML is not an issue) even if there are potentially tens of millions of distinct values, in a table that has say hundreds of millions of rows.   However, if a column is unique or “approaches” uniqueness, then one [...]

I thought before I jump into a topic that requires looking at a number of index block dumps, it might be worth briefly recapping how one goes about dumping index blocks in Oracle.   A block dump is simply a formatted representation of the contents of a particular Oracle database block.  Although I’ll be focusing [...]