Dropped Tables, Hiding Extents and Slow DBA_FREE_SPACE Queries

My last post was on slow dictionary queries caused by having many, many thousands of extents in your database. This post is about a special case of this problem, which I encountered recently. It was on an Exadata box – Exadata is not particularly relevant to the issue, but I’m curious to see if mentioning Exadata will make this post more popular 🙂

I was querying the used and free space on a very small database on the client’s X2-2 1/4 rack Exadata machine. The query was really slow, taking about 30 seconds. This is a FAST box, what is going on?

I quickly realised that the problem was specific to one tablespace:

>@SPC_SUM
Enter the tablespace (or leave null)> DATA_01

TS_NAME              ORD      SUM_BLKS        SUM_K  MAX_CHNK_K NUM_CHNK
-------------------- ----- ----------- ------------ ----------- --------
DATA_01              alloc     262,144    2,097,152   2,097,152        1
                     free       63,128      505,024     504,384       11
2 rows selected.
Elapsed: 00:00:00.21

> @SPC_SUM
Enter the tablespace (or leave null)> USERS

TS_NAME              ORD      SUM_BLKS        SUM_K  MAX_CHNK_K NUM_CHNK
-------------------- ----- ----------- ------------ ----------- --------
USERS                alloc     748,320    5,986,560   5,372,160        2
                     free      127,904    1,023,232       6,144    3,058
2 rows selected.

Elapsed: 00:00:26.05

We can see it takes 0.21 seconds for tablespace DATA_01, 26.05 seconds for the USERS. Yes, USERS is larger but not 150 times larger. What is going on? Well, as the title of this post suggests, it is down to dropping tables. The below shows my route to that conclusion.

What I could see was that for the USERS tablespace the maximum chunk of free space was relatively small compared to the sum of free space – 6MB out of 1GB, pretty much – and that there was a lot of individual pieces of free space, 3,058. This tablespace was shattered into a lot of bits. So, what sort of extent size management do we have? How big are the tables and indexes in this tablespace {NB I already knew we had no partitions so I did not have to worry about that}.

select tablespace_name,initial_extent,next_extent
      ,extent_management,min_extlen,allocation_type
from dba_tablespaces where tablespace_name ='USERS'

TABLESPACE_NAME                INITIAL_EXTENT NEXT_EXTENT EXTENT_MAN MIN_EXTLEN ALLOCATIO
------------------------------ -------------- ----------- ---------- ---------- ---------
USERS                                   65536             LOCAL           65536 SYSTEM

select tablespace_name,blocks,count(*) from dba_extents
where tablespace_name = 'USERS'
group by tablespace_name,blocks
having count(*) >1
order by blocks desc,tablespace_name

TABLESPACE_NAME                    BLOCKS   COUNT(*)
------------------------------ ---------- ----------
USERS                                2560          2
USERS                                2048          3
USERS                                1536          7
USERS                                1408          5
USERS                                1280          2
USERS                                1248          2
USERS                                1152          2
USERS                                1024        229
USERS                                 896         15
USERS                                 768         21
USERS                                 736          3
USERS                                 720          3
USERS                                 704          2
USERS                                 672          2
USERS                                 640         25
USERS                                 624          2
USERS                                 576          2
USERS                                 512        117
USERS                                 400          2
USERS                                 384         34
USERS                                 360          2
USERS                                 312          2
USERS                                 288          4
USERS                                 256         49
USERS                                 248          2
USERS                                 240          2
USERS                                 192          5
USERS                                 160          4
USERS                                 128       1165
USERS                                   8       1788

30 rows selected.

So we have system controlled extent allocation, this should be fine. I did a quick check of the table contents – 300 or so tables and 200 or so indexes. And, as you can see from the check of extents above, very few larger extents and a lot of small ones. {As a little aside, note the relatively large number of 8-block, 128-block, 256-block and 1024-block extents; These are the sizes that LMTs with system managed extents tend to use unless a similar sized chunk is found to be available, in which case it is used}.

I did some other checks on indexes and segment sizes and it all boiled down to one thing. There were not a lot of things in this tablespace, what was there was small and… The total of all those table and index blocks was way less than the used space in the tablespace.

That is the major indicator of what is going on here. The difference in space used in the tablespace and the total of the visible tables and indexes.

The last link in the chain is the recycle bin.

select owner,ts_name,count(*) from dba_recyclebin group by owner,ts_name

OWNER                          TS_NAME                          COUNT(*)
------------------------------ ------------------------------ ----------
USER1                          USERS                              542356
USER1                                                                  2
WEGWEGWEG                      USERS                                  97
KKKUKUYLLX                     USERS                                 149
USOVFPKEKS                     USERS                                   3
....
ERHJTRTTTURT                   USERS                                   4

11 rows selected.

That’s 542,356 objects in the recyclebin for one user, in the one tablespace. My problem tablespace. The penny clicked, something I had already noticed and was a little uncomfortable about fell into place.

The client is using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) to pull data together and put it into the database. The process they are using basically creates a table, uses it to load some data into and then pushes the data into the target tables. Then drops the table. The drop does not do a “DROP TABLE … PURGE;”. This is done many, many times per load cycle, which is intended to run several times a day.

Something you should always keep in mind with the recyclebin is that the tables, indexes and their extents that go into the recycle bin do not get reported in several of the key data dictionary views. I did mention this in a blog post way back but maybe a whole post on it is called for.

So, the tablespace was being shattered by the constant creating and dropping of small tables. It was hidden from easy view due to how the recyclebin is (not) exposed in data dictionary views.

It is not good practice to constantly create and drop lots of tables. As well as the admittedly rather odd impact that this posting is all about, there is a lot of internal work involved for the oracle database in creating and dropping tables. It is an overhead best avoided. The client had good reasons for this approach but now they are going to look at the alternatives.

I’ve not actually proven in this posting that all those dropped tables is the actual cause of the slow performance in querying the free space in that tablespace {though the corroborative evidence is very strong}. Neither have I said how we cleared up the mess. I’ll cover both of those in the next post on this mini-thread.