The sun is the same in a different way

As promised there is now a script at my site that will allow you to play with arbitrary insertions and deletions into tables in order to attempt to create indexes that have inconsistent heights. Hopefully it educates a bit about treedumps as well.

There is of course a caveat, which is if your version of oracle does a full block dump of every leaf block and you use the numbers I give (which under 9i complete in a reasonable time on a windows laptop) you might well eat excessive disk space. For most this will not be the case.

as usual let us know if this is helpful or misleading.

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