IOTs by the Oracle Indexing Expert

I’m really pleased to see that Richard Foote has started a series on Index Organized Tables. You can see his introductory post on the topic here. As ever with Richard, he puts in lots of detail and explanation and I’ve been a fan of his blogging style for a long time.

I’ve got a few posts on the topic left to do myself, maybe this competition will spur me to get on and write them!

What I will also be very interested to see is the different way we will cover the same topic. Richard has already put in a block dump and dug into the details a little at a low level about how the data is stored, which I have not done. He has also shown how using an IOT instead of a fully overloaded index (where you create an index covering all the columns of the table, to avoid visiting the table for other columns) results in not only saving the space taken up by the redundant heap table but that the IOT index is smaller than the fully overloaded index. This is due to the lack of a rowid.

I put in occasional pictures and maybe write more about how the example matches real world situations. If you want, you can look back at my own introduction to the topic.

I’m sure this is going to be an excellent series and I’ll be following it myself.