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Getting accurate measures of table space

Brian Peasland EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Brian Peasland

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QUESTION POSED ON: 17 May 2002
I am having a problem with the dba_free_space view. We have a large amount of purging going on in our database recently, and the space is not being reflected in dba_free_space because of the HWM. Is there any better way to get a true measurement of the space used in a situation like this ?

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The DBA_FREE_SPACE view will show you how much free space has not been allocated in a tablespace. Unfortunately as you've found out, when you delete data from a table you do not reset the HWM. You also do not free up any space in any extents for that table.

To get more accurate measures of the amount of actual space in a table, use the DBMS_SPACE package, particularly the UNUSED_SPACE procedure of this package. This will tell you how much space *below the HWM* is in the table. For more information on this procedure, refer to the Oracle docs (http://technet.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle8i/doc_library/817_doc/appdev.817/a76936/dbms_sp2.htm#1002300).

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