ASO physical clear increases cube size?

Question

I am testing out performance and feasibility of a physical clear and have noticed that the cube size actually INCREASES after doing a physical delete. The cube size increased from 11.9 GB to 21.9 GB. Anyone know why?
Our ASO cube is used as a forecasting application and models are being updated consistently. Logical delete won't work because a model can be updated multiple times and direct quote from manual precludes the logical clear option.
"Oracle does not recommend performing a second logical clear region operation on the same region, because the second operation does not clear the compensating cells created in the first operation and does not create new compensating cells."
Here is the MDX I used to do a physical clear of ~120 models from the cube.
alter database Express.Express clear data in region
PM10113,
PM10123,
PM10124,
PM10140,
PM6503,
PM6507,
PM6508,
PM6509,
PM6520,
PM6528
}' Physical;
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I am sorry but I do not have my test system available so i will have to do it from memory.
I am surprised at this - it is what you would expect if you did a logical clear. When you look at db statistics does the number of cells reflect the original less the cleared area? And does it show no slices? If so then you did do a physical as your maxl indicates.
You might want to stop and start the application. Otherwise I will have to check some more.
But given the size of the increase (almost doubled) I would wonder why you would do a clear as opposed to a reset. Finally I am wondering why you are doing a clear at all? Why not just a send and let an incremental slice. That way only the changed cells would be found in the slice. More important the slices would be quite small and likely automatically "merged".
Finally - I am wondering about the DBAG quote (page 982 on PDF) you included. Again I would have to test but I think they are only warning that the the number of slices will start to build up but I would expect that "because the second operation does not clear the compensating cells created in the first operation and does not create new compensating cells". The net result would still be correct.