Re: dump reading

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 18:22:09 +0200, Edgar Chupit <chupit_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the link and now the final question: why does somebody
> needs to read block dump? All I can think of is when you have block
> corruption and cannot recover using BLOCKRECOVER feature of RMAN.
> Maybe people from the list can provide real cases where they needed to
> read block/heap dump and their knowledge helped them?

Its definitely useful for finding out in excruciating detail how Oracle behaves internally.

There was a discussion a while back on usenet about indexes reusing deleted space. dumping the blocks involved demonstrates what happens.

I have a niggle in the back of my mind about system managed extent allocation, I think that a way to investigate when and how oracle runs into the old problem of tablespace fragmentation using autoallocate for extent sizing may require taking a number of dumps of the bitmap block to see what bits get turned on and off when. AFAIK no-one has done this, they probably have lives or something.

its also very very unlikely to be useful in day to day work.

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com
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