Re: Extents: Less or More?

I've already replied to you privatley in Email, but now I see the question posted here as well. My point about > 1 extents was that you may end up with fragmentation of the indivigual extents since they do not have to be contiguious to each other. Of course, this can also be a good thing since they can exist on other drives, thus spreading out the IO... :o)
There is, of course, a bit of additional overhead incured with the creation process of additional extents, although on a long running transaction this is probably negligable. The issue about chained rows has been addressed, but multipule extent creation can be a sign of this and other problems relating to the PCTFREE/PCTUSED not be properly setup. I prefer to setup my tables to stay at one extent so that I might user multipule extents as part of "exception" processing, that is, if a table is > 1 extent, then I need to address why, because it is designed (usualy) not to be so.
Of course,there are times when you want > 1 extent (duh), there are times when you HAVE to have > 1 extent. I think though, that the old generaly guideline of build your tables to live in a single extent, is a good one.

Robert
Sr. Consultant
ARIS Corp.
Seattle, Wa.

• My opinions are my own, and I'm here to learn as much as to teach..