> From: Jonathan Lewis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
>
> The answer to the question you asked is to
> check the dba_indexes view for columns
> distinct_keys and num_rows.
Jeeez, guess I hadn't looked hard enough. Thx...
> It is not sensible to change a b-tree index into
> a bitmap index simply because it has a relatively
> small number of distinct values. (Even if you
> have seen an article in Oracle Magazine that
> might suggest otherwise).
Heh. And in other places...
> Bitmap indexes tend to degrade catastrophically
> as the underlying table suffers inserts and deletes
> or gets updates to the indexed column. And the
> probability of contention and deadlock on concurrent
> inserts/updates/deletes is very high.
Good point. This data is mixed tp/dss, so I'll need to make sure that's taken into account.
> Before going much further down your current path,
> you might like to read a couple of articles I've
> written about bitmap indexes at
> www.dbazine.com
Thank you very much.
