Unique Indexes

In Part I, I showed a demo of how the introduction of a Unique Index appears to force a hint to be “ignored”. This is a classic case of what difference a Unique Index can make in the CBO deliberations. So what’s going on here? When I run the first, un-hinted query: we notice something a […]

As I was compiling my new “Oracle Diagnostics and Performance Tuning” seminar, I realised there were quite a number of indexing performance issues I haven’t discussed here previously. The following is a classic example of what difference a Unique Index can have over a Non-Unique index, while also covering the classic myth that Oracle sometimes […]

In my last post, I discussed how both 1/2 empty and totally empty leaf blocks can be generated by rolling back a bulk update operation. An important point I made within the comments of the previous post is that almost the exact scenario would have taken place had the transaction committed rather than rolled back. A […]

The maximum size for VARCHAR2, NVARCHAR and RAW columns has been extended to 32767 bytes with the Oracle 12c Database. However, indexing such columns with standard indexes comes with some challenges. These extended data types are not enabled by default within the database but can easily be done so by following these steps: Restart the […]

As I discussed previously in Part I, the space occupied by orphaned row entries associated with asynchronously maintained global indexes is not automatically reclaimed by subsequent DML operations within the index. Hence the need to clean out these orphaned index entries via the various options discussed in Part II. However, a good question by Jason […]

In this part of the series I'll cover some basics about data loading:

1. If you want to load a large amount of data quickly into a table or partition that gets truncated before the load and indexes also need to be maintained, then it is probably faster to set the the indexes to unusable before the load and rebuild them afterwards instead of letting the insert maintain the indexes. Note that even with a direct-path insert the index maintenance of usable indexes will generate undo and redo, whereas a separate index rebuild doesn't generate undo and can be also be run as a nologging operation if desired. However, as always, test for your particular situation/configuration as the index maintenance as part of direct-path inserts are quite efficient and therefore might not be that much slower than separate index rebuild steps.

As discussed in the previous post, a Bitmap index on a unique column will be larger than a corresponding Btree index due to the additional overheads associated with each index entry (such as the additional rowid, the additional column length bytes and the bitmap column itself). Oracle therefore attempts to protect you from explicitly creating such [...]

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 [...]