What happens if tablespace is full

I am totally got stucked and not able to choose which way I need to go. Please suggest me which is good and why it is? You should consider having some max limit for the datafiles. Once the limit is full use another datafile. This helps in most of the environments for good management. Find out the tables which are occupied more space, check whether you have any backup tables if not needed consult with your pm.

More space is more money. Metalink document We are doing the exact same thing here for the ORA error, and therefore it seems like a relatively safe thing to do. Like most debugging or diagnostic facilities, you should only use the ORA diagnostic event to the extent you really need to. Instead of waiting for a temporary tablespace to fill and for statements to fail, you can monitor temporary space usage in the database in real time.

The following query displays information about all sort segments in the database. Typically, Oracle will create a new sort segment the very first time a sort to disk occurs in a new temporary tablespace. The sort segment will grow as needed, but it will not shrink and will not go away after all sorts to disk are completed. A database with one temporary tablespace will typically have just one sort segment. The query displays for each sort segment in the database the tablespace the segment resides in, the size of the tablespace, the amount of space within the sort segment that is currently in use, and the amount of space available.

Sample output from this query is as follows:. Right now, 9 MB of the sort segment is in use, leaving a total of 9, MB available for additional sort operations. Note that the available space may consist of unused blocks within the sort segment, unallocated extents in the TEMP tablespace, or a combination of the two.

The following query displays information about each database session that is using space in a sort segment. Although one session may have many sort operations active at once, this query summarizes the information by session. The query displays information about each database session that is using space in a sort segment, along with the amount of sort space and the temporary tablespace being used, and the number of sort operations in that session that are using sort space.

This example shows that there is one database session using sort segment space. The connection was initiated by the httpd db1 process running under the rpk operating system user, and the Oracle server process has operating system process ID The following query displays information about each statement that is using space in a sort segment. The query displays information about each statement using space in a sort segment, including information about the database session that issued the statement and the temporary tablespace and amount of sort space being used.

One statement is currently using 8 MB of sort segment space, while the other is using 1 MB. The text of each statement, along with its hash value and address in the shared SQL area are also displayed. When a permanent table is updated in any way, it creates quite a bit of overhead — it generates undo, and it generates redo, and it takes up space in a permanent tablespace. Global temporary tables are very good for this role with the caveat that enough space needs to be free in the target temporary tablespace.

If there is one particular account that is frequently filling up temporary space which affects other accounts, it is possible to assign different temporary tablespaces to different users — or, several groups of users can share one temporary tablespace. If a session fills up a temporary tablespace, which will cause it to expand as much as it can, that space is not automatically reclaimed when that session goes away.

This can cause the temporary tablespace to use much more disk space than necessary. This command will shrink it as much as possible:. If you wish to drop a tempfile which is usually not needed , and that file is not in use, use this:. When an operation such as a sort, hash, or global temporary table instantiation is too large to fit in memory, Oracle allocates space in a temporary tablespace for intermediate data to be written to disk.

If a sort operation runs out of space, the statement initiating the sort will fail. It may only take one query missing part of its WHERE clause to fill an entire temporary tablespace and cause many users to encounter failure because the temporary tablespace is full.

It is easy to detect when failures have occurred in the database due to a lack of temporary space. With the setting of a simple diagnostic event, it is also easy to see the exact text of each statement that fails for this reason.

These views make it possible to identify usage at the database, session, and even statement level. Oracle DBAs can use the techniques outlined in this paper to diagnose temporary tablespace problems and monitor sorting activity in a proactive way. Tablespaces allocate space in extents. Tablespaces can use two different methods to keep track of their free and used space:. Dictionary managed tablespaces: Extent management by the data dictionary. When you create a tablespace, you choose one of these methods of space management.

A tablespace that manages its own extents maintains a bitmap in each datafile to keep track of the free or used status of blocks in that datafile. Each bit in the bitmap corresponds to a block or a group of blocks. When an extent is allocated or freed for reuse, Oracle changes the bitmap values to show the new status of the blocks. These changes do not generate rollback information because they do not update tables in the data dictionary except for special cases such as tablespace quota information.

Local management of extents automatically tracks adjacent free space, eliminating the need to coalesce free extents. Local management of extents avoids recursive space management operations. Such recursive operations can occur in dictionary managed tablespaces if consuming or releasing space in an extent results in another operation that consumes or releases space in a data dictionary table or rollback segment.

The sizes of extents that are managed locally can be determined automatically by the system. Alternatively, all extents can have the same size in a locally managed tablespace and override object storage options. Your choices are:. This keyword tells Oracle that you want to use bitmaps to manage the free space within segments. A bitmap, in this case, is a map that describes the status of each data block within a segment with respect to the amount of space in the block available for inserting rows.

As more or less space becomes available in a data block, its new state is reflected in the bitmap. Bitmaps enable Oracle to manage free space more automatically; thus, this form of space management is called automatic segment-space management.

Locally managed tablespaces using automatic segment-space management can be created as smallfile traditional or bigfile tablespaces. AUTO is the default. This keyword tells Oracle that you want to use free lists for managing free space within segments. Free lists are lists of data blocks that have space available for inserting rows. Oracle Database Administrator's Guide for more information about automatic segment space management.

If y ou created your database with an earlier version of Oracle, then you could be using dictionary managed tablespaces. For a tablespace that uses the data dictionary to manage its extents, Oracle updates the appropriate tables in the data dictionary whenever an extent is allocated or freed for reuse. Oracle also stores rollback information about each update of the dictionary tables. Because dictionary tables and rollback segments are part of the database, the space that they occupy is subject to the same space management operations as all other data.

Oracle supports multiple block sizes in a database. This is set when the database is created and can be any valid size. Legitimate values are from 2K to 32K.

In the initialization parameter file or server parameter, you can configure subcaches within the buffer cache for each of these block sizes. Subcaches can also be configured while an instance is running. You can create tablespaces having any of these block sizes. The standard block size is used for the system tablespace and most other tablespaces. Multiple block sizes are useful primarily when transporting a tablespace from an OLTP database to an enterprise data warehouse.

This facilitates transport between databases of different block sizes. Oracle Database Data Warehousing Guide for information about transporting tablespaces in data warehousing environments. A database administrator can bring any tablespace other than the SYSTEM tablespace online accessible or offline not accessible whenever the database is open. A tablespace is usually online so that the data contained within it is available to database users.

However, the database administrator can take a tablespace offline for maintenance or backup and recovery purposes. When a tablespace goes offline, Oracle does not permit any subsequent SQL statements to reference objects contained in that tablespace. Active transactions with completed statements that refer to data in that tablespace are not affected at the transaction level.

Oracle saves rollback data corresponding to those completed statements in a deferred rollback segment in the SYSTEM tablespace. When the tablespace is brought back online, Oracle applies the rollback data to the tablespace, if needed. When a tablespace goes offline or comes back online, this is recorded in the data dictionary in the SYSTEM tablespace.

If a tablespace is offline when you shut down a database, the tablespace remains offline when the database is subsequently mounted and reopened. You can bring a tablespace online only in the database in which it was created because the necessary data dictionary information is maintained in the SYSTEM tablespace of that database. An offline tablespace cannot be read or edited by any utility other than Oracle.

Thus, offline tablespaces cannot be transposed to other databases. Oracle automatically switches a tablespace from online to offline when certain errors are encountered. For example, Oracle switches a tablespace from online to offline when the database writer process, DBW n , fails in several attempts to write to a datafile of the tablespace. Users trying to access tables in the offline tablespace receive an error.

Oracle Database Utilities for more information about tools for data transfer. If you create multiple tablespaces to separate different types of data, you take specific tablespaces offline for various procedures.

Other tablespaces remain online, and the information in them is still available for use. However, special circumstances can occur when tablespaces are taken offline. For example, if two tablespaces are used to separate table data from index data, the following is true:. If the tablespace containing the indexes is offline, then queries can still access table data because queries do not require an index to access the table data.

If the tablespace containing the tables is offline, then the table data in the database is not accessible because the tables are required to access the data. If Oracle has enough information in the online tablespaces to run a statement, it does so. If it needs data in an offline tablespace, then it causes the statement to fail. The primary purpose of read-only tablespaces is to eliminate the need to perform backup and recovery of large, static portions of a database. Read-only tablespaces cannot be modified.

After updating the tablespace, you can then reset it to be read only. Also, if you need to recover your database, you do not need to recover any read-only tablespaces, because they could not have been modified. You can manage space for sort operations more efficiently by designating one or more temporary tablespaces exclusively for sorts. Doing so effectively eliminates serialization of space management operations involved in the allocation and deallocation of sort space. A single SQL operation can use more than one temporary tablespace for sorting.

For example, you can create indexes on very large tables, and the sort operation during index creation can be distributed across multiple tablespaces. All operations that use sorts, including joins, index builds, ordering, computing aggregates GROUP BY , and collecting optimizer statistics, benefit from temporary tablespaces. The performance gains are significant with Real Application Clusters. One or more temporary tablespaces can be used only for sort segments.

A temporary tablespace is not the same as a tablespace that a user designates for temporary segments, which can be any tablespace available to the user.

No permanent schema objects can reside in a temporary tablespace. Sort segments are used when a segment is shared by multiple sort operations. One sort segment exists for every instance that performs a sort operation in a given tablespace. Temporary tablespaces provide performance improvements when you have multiple sorts that are too large to fit into memory. The sort segment of a given temporary tablespace is created at the time of the first sort operation. The sort segment expands by allocating extents until the segment size is equal to or greater than the total storage demands of all of the active sorts running on that instance.

Oracle Database Performance Tuning Guide for information about setting up temporary tablespaces for sorts and hash joins.

A transportable tablespace lets you move a subset of an Oracle database from one Oracle database to another, even across different platforms. You can clone a tablespace and plug it into another database, copying the tablespace between databases, or you can unplug a tablespace from one Oracle database and plug it into another Oracle database, moving the tablespace between databases.

When you transport tablespaces you can also move index data, so you do not have to rebuild the indexes after importing or loading the table data.

You can transport tablespaces across platforms. Many, but not all, platforms are supported for cross-platform tablespace transport. This can be used for the following:. Provide an easier and more efficient means for content providers to publish structured data and distribute it to customers running Oracle on a different platform.

Simplify the distribution of data from a data warehouse environment to data marts which are often running on smaller platforms. A tablesp ace repository is a collection of tablespace sets. Tablespace repositories are built on file group repositories, but tablespace repositories only contain the files required to move or copy tablespaces between databases.

Different tablespace sets may be stored in a tablespace repository, and different versions of a particular tablespace set also may be stored. A version of a tablespace set in a tablespace repository consists of the following files:.

Both the datafiles and the metadata export file must be copied to the target database. The transport of these files can be done using any facility for copying flat files, such as the operating system copying facility, ftp, or publishing on CDs.