Temp. segments/extents not being dropped

Looking for some information on the following:

We had an incident last week where an Oracle instance (7.3.4.4) on NT was running into problems acquiring space for additional extents on the defined temporary tablespace.

While looking at the situation, we discovered that there was just about zero
free space left in the tablespace. There was a whole bunch of extents created and owned by "SYS" and they had some flaky numeric identifier for the segment-name (something like 37.123).

Other processes were failing, being unable to allocate temp space.

We looked around on Metalink, and discovered a note about forcing temporary segments/extents to be cleaned up by performing an "ALTER TABLESPACE TEMP DEFAULT STORAGE (PCTINCREASE 0);"

We executed the statement. Lo and behold, all the segments disappeared, back into
free space.

My guess is that there was a large sort (we do some of those) that failed, and left segments out there. I do not understand why they wouldn't clean up. Received on Mon Jun 05 2000 - 12:52:23 CDT