Oracle Dictionary fragmentation

The purpose of this post is mainly to highlight the performance degradation due to dictionary index fragmentation. It is something that oracle not widely announce but it came from the physical structure of the database.

Oracle databases have the AGE and the age mainly came from the number of DDL operations done on the database. The DDL operations modify the dictionary and introduce fragmentation to the indexes and tables.

I have made the small test case

-- CREATE TABLE
DROP TABLE list_customers
/
CREATE TABLE list_customers
   ( customer_id             NUMBER(6)
   , cust_first_name         VARCHAR2(20)
   , cust_last_name          VARCHAR2(20)
   , nls_territory           VARCHAR2(30)
   , cust_email              VARCHAR2(30))
   PARTITION BY LIST (nls_territory) (
   PARTITION asia VALUES ('CHINA', 'THAILAND'),
   PARTITION europe VALUES ('GERMANY', 'ITALY', 'SWITZERLAND'),
   PARTITION west VALUES ('AMERICA'),
   PARTITION east VALUES ('INDIA'))
/
-- ADD partitions
ALTER SESSION SET EVENTS '10046 trace name context forever, level 4'
/
ALTER TABLE list_customers ADD PARTITION south VALUES ('ANTARCTICA')
/
EXIT
-- DROP partition
ALTER SESSION SET EVENTS '10046 trace name context forever, level 4'
/
ALTER TABLE list_customers DROP PARTITION south
/
EXIT

It is oversimplified method without dependancies to the object and object statistics. But it already create two massive traces.
In summary during the INSERT command we insert to tables
OBJ$, DEFERRED_STG$ and TABPART$
During delete operation we remove rows from this tables
As you all know insert-delete tables have high level of fragmentation on the indexed columns

We run the standard report for indexes on 3 mentioned tables and it shows that estimated number of leaf blocks for some of them dramatically smaller then the actual one.

INDEX	Estimated Size	Actual Size
SYS.TABPART$.I_TABPART_OBJ$	47	279
SYS.OBJ$.I_OBJ3	4	20
SYS.OBJ$.I_OBJ4	422	1475
SYS.OBJ$.I_OBJ1	422	969
SYS.TABPART$.I_TABPART_BOPART$	68	125
SYS.DEFERRED_STG$.I_DEFERRED_STG1	30	53
SYS.OBJ$.I_OBJ5	1269	1728
SYS.OBJ$.I_OBJ2	1269	1726

In case you would try to rebuild this indexes in usual way, you would get the oracle error

ORA-00701: object necessary for warmstarting database cannot be altered

that actually block all attempts to fix the fragmentation.

Index fragmentation primarelly affect index FULL and RANGE scans operation but not UNIQUE index scan. UNIQUE scan would be affected only when INDEX would grow for additional level.

The number in a table does not show something dramatic but it looks like we already have mensurable performance impact on common database operations, like name resolution.

In long term I think every database with high number of structure modifications has to go through process of APPLICATION DATA migration regularly once in 5-15 years.