Re: Bitmapped Indexes, Anyone?

We've played around with bitmaps, and currently have them turned off. We encounted a few bugs while running 7.3.2.3 on HU-UX. However, I've just received a "patch release" from Oracle this very week of version 7.3.3.1, which the tech support person on the phone said would fix the bitmap bugs. In our testing of bitmaps, we found massive storage savings, as well as a few cases where query speed increased. Unfortunately, we had several other cases where queries locked up altogether--hence 7.3.3.1.

I'm anxious to find out if the new release works. In our warehouse, we have several fiscal year indexes. On a table with 20 million records, a bitmap index trimmed down the fiscal year index by about 600 megs. I like that savings! Another post pointed you to the documentation. Read it thoroughly, and then test the bitmaps before you go into production. You may find you need 7.3.3.1, as well!

Best of luck!

--brad skiles, DBA
Purdue University

> I've read in several press releases, magazine articles and books
> about a mystical new feature of Oracle 7.3, the bitmapped index.
> I even saw a description of how to create one of these elusive
> creatures <CREATE BITMAP INDEX BM_IDX ON TAB_NAME (COLUMN); >
>
> However, none of our 7.3 documentation seems to refer to these
> objects and I can't issue the above statement in SQL*Plus.
>
> Has anyone out there created such indexes with 7.3 & if so how?
> Is there a server option which is needed?
  Received on Thu Jun 12 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT