Turning the Tables on Disk I/O

You can use the export/import method to accomplish the same goal, but the CTAS method has some advantages: Instead of spending hours with the Oracle EXPORT-IMPORT utilities, CTAS requires only a few simple SQL statements. And because CTAS is one of the two dozen or so operations that Oracle can execute in parallel (if you employ the appropriate syntax), it works well for large tables as well as small ones. The process basically is as follows:

• Create a new table from the old one, using the table's index to establish the appropriate data sequence.
  
• Give the old table a different name, and, optionally, store it in a different tablespace.
  
• Give the new table the name of the old table.
  
• Create a new index on the renamed, reorganized table.

To use this technique, you must have a primary index on the table in question and you must be running Oracle Database Server Release 7.3.4 or later, since the AS SELECT syntax for CREATE TABLE wasn't supported before that.

Will Your System Benefit?

The degree to which resequencing improves performance depends on how far out of sequence the rows are when you begin and how many rows you will be accessing in sequence. You can find out how well a table's rows match the index's sequence key by looking at the DBA_INDEXES and DBA_TABLES views in the data dictionary: DBA_INDEXES contains descriptions of all indexes in the database; DBA_TABLES contains descriptions of all relational tables in the database.

To gather statistics, you can use the SQL ANALYZE command. (Remember, though, that collecting statistics can affect optimizer behavior and severely degrade a system and that a large table can take some time to analyze.) If you analyze as SYS, you need to include the index and table owners in the ANALYZE command. It's preferable to do the ANALYZE as the schema owner.

In the DBA_INDEXES view, look at the clustering_factor column: If the clustering factor-an integer-roughly matches the number of blocks in the table, your table is in sequence with the index order. However, if the clustering factor is close to the number of rows in the table, it indicates that the rows in the table are out of sequence with the index.

Two Alternatives

If you determine that your table can benefit from resequencing, you need to decide which approach to take. You can use the CTAS statement in one of two ways:

• in conjunction with an ORDER BY clause
  
• in conjunction with a hint that identifies the index to use

Basically, the CTAS statement copies the selected portion of the table into a new table. If you select the entire table with an ORDER BY clause or an index hint, it will copy the rows in the same order as the primary index. In addition to resequencing the rows of the new table, the CTAS statement coalesces free space and chained rows and resets free lists, thereby providing additional performance benefits. You can also alter table parameters, such as initial extents and the number of free lists, as you create the new table.

The approach you choose depends on the size of the table involved, the overall processing power of your environment, and how quickly you need to have the tables back online and available. The details of each approach are discussed more fully below, but in either case, when you create the new table, you can speed the process by using the NOLOGGING option (called UNRECOVERABLE prior to Oracle8) to skip the added overhead of the redo-log file (back up the old and new tablespaces).

Using CTAS with the ORDER BY clause. To use the CTAS statement with the ORDER BY clause (and a PARALLEL clause, to reduce the processing time), structure the CTAS statement. Using this approach without the PARALLEL clause can be very slow. The database reads the original table quickly (generally in non-index order) by invoking a full-table scan to retrieve the rows and then performs a massive sort of the table to resequence the rows before it actually creates the new table.

The PARALLEL clause causes the CTAS operation to execute on multiple processes (or multiple threads, in Microsoft Windows NT), which sometimes makes the ORDER BY approach faster than the index-hint approach. If your hardware has multiple CPUs and many-perhaps hundreds-of processes, for example, this approach is likely to be significantly faster. However, if your hardware configuration has a relatively modest number of processes (such as the four specified in the example), the index-hint approach is likely to be faster.

Using CTAS with an index hint. With this approach, structure your CTAS statement. When this statement executes, the database traverses the existing primary-key index to access the rows for the new table, bypassing the sorting operation. Most Oracle DBAs choose this method over the ORDER BY approach, because the runtime performance of traversing an index is generally faster than using the PARALLEL clause and then sorting the entire result set (unless you have a massive amount of processing power). Use EXPLAIN PLAN to verify that it is using the correct index.

Because you can't use an index hint with a PARALLEL clause, the index-hint approach cannot take advantage of parallel processing to reorganize a single table. (This is because the Oracle database must perform a full-table scan to process a query in parallel, whereas the index hint causes the system to traverse the index and never use a full-table scan.) You can, however, use parallel processing to reorganize multiple tables simultaneously.

Reorganizing Tables Quickly

Many Oracle DBAs who use the CTAS method choose to place each large table in a dedicated tablespace (generally with a name that contains the table name), along with a separate dedicated tablespace for the reorganized copy of the table. If you reorganize your tables at regular intervals (since adding and deleting records gradually puts the physical rows further out of sequence with the index order), you can copy the tables back and forth at each reorganization. For example, a customer table might reside in tablespace CUSTOMER_FLIP until reorganization, when it would move to CUSTOMER_FLOP; at the next reorganization, it would move back to CUSTOMER_FLIP.

When you are reorganizing from one tablespace to another, you should always have a backup copy of the table and a back-out procedure. The original table remains online for query in cases of data inconsistency, and you never need to perform a full restore if the table becomes corrupt. The only real cost of this method is the disk space required to duplicate major reorganized tablespaces.

Listing 3 shows the SQL syntax needed to reorganize a table by copying it from one tablespace to another and changing the table-storage parameters as needed. In addition to the CTAS statement (in this example using the index-hint approach), Listing 3 shows the setup preceding the statement and the renaming and index-creation steps that follow it.

Multiplexing Tables

If you have several tables to reorganize, you can save time by running the jobs simultaneously, in parallel. (If you have a large enough system, you can run multiple concurrent CTAS, too.)

When you process the tables in parallel, the total time required to reorganize all the tables is no more than that for the largest table. For example, if you need to reorganize 100GB of tables in a single weekend, the parallel approach is the only way to go.

Processing multiple CTAS jobs simultaneously is not the same as using a PARALLEL clause to execute a single CTAS job using multiple processes. In addition, processing multiple CTAS jobs does not require a PARALLEL clause in the CTAS statement, so you can use either the index-hint approach or the ORDER BY approach in the CTAS statement.

Listing 4 is a Korn shell script you can use to execute the reorganization script in Listing 3. This script accepts the table name as input, so you can easily call it from a higher-level script (such as the one in Listing 5) and run the reorganization script multiple times, in parallel, for different tables. (For further flexibility, you can also modify the script in Listing 3 to accept the number of extents as an input.)

The Low-I/O Way To Go

If response times are lagging in your high-transaction system, reducing disk I/O is the best way to bring about quick improvement. And when you access tables in a transaction system exclusively through range scans in primary-key indexes, reorganizing the tables with the CTAS method should be one of the first strategies you use to reduce I/O. By physically sequencing the rows in the same order as the primary-key index, this method can considerably speed up data retrieval.

Like disk-load balancing, table reorganization is easy, inexpensive, and relatively quick. With both techniques in your DBA bag of tricks, you'll be well equipped to shorten response times-often dramatically-in high-I/O systems.

Oracle Indexing Basics

The main goal of an index is to speed the process of finding data. An index file contains a data value for a specific field in a table and a pointer that identifies the record that contains a value for that field. In other words, an index on the last_name field for a table would contain a list of last names and pointers to specific records-just as an index to a book lists topics and page numbers to enable readers to access information quickly. When processing a request, the database can use some or all of the available indexes to efficiently locate the requested rows. Oracle uses several indexing schemes, but B-tree indexes are the most common.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate some of the concepts of a B-tree index. The upper blocks contain index data that points to lower-level index blocks. The lowest-level blocks contain every indexed data value and a corresponding row ID used for locating the actual row of data.

To illustrate how resequencing can reduce response times, consider a table in which the rows are not in the same sequence as the index. When the index is used to retrieve a series of rows that are adjacent to each other in the indexed version of the table, the index tree points to widely scattered locations among the physical blocks where the row data is stored (see Figure 1). Because the system must access many blocks to retrieve the data, it requires many I/O operations. If you resequence the table, however, the rows will match the order of the primary-key index. Thus, the data from adjacent rows in the indexed table is stored in a single physical location on the disk (see Figure 2), and I/O is reduced because the system needs to access fewer blocks in order to retrieve the data.