Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Shrinking Segments:
The diagram in the slide describes the two phases of a table shrink operation. The first phase does the compaction. During this phase, rows are moved to the left part of the segment as much as possible. Internally, rows are moved by packets to avoid locking issues. After the rows have been moved, the second phase of the shrink operation is started. During this phase, the high-water mark (HWM) is adjusted and the unused space is released.The COMPACT clause is useful if you have long-running queries that might span the shrink operation and attempt to read from blocks that have been reclaimed. When you specify the SHRINK SPACE COMPACT clause, the progress of the shrink operation is saved in the bitmap blocks of the corresponding segment. This means that the next time a shrink operation is executed on the same segment, the Oracle database server remembers what has been done already. You can then reissue the SHRINK SPACE clause without the COMPACT clause during off-peak hours to complete the second phase.