How to remove soft deleted records?

Question

Hi everybody,
Are there any ways to remove soft deleted records from LT table?
For instance, table is versioned and database has few workspaces. The user removes some data from LIVe workspace (or from other workspaces). The removed records are marked as deleted in the LT table, but never removed from LT table even the compression is executed on all workspaces.
I found the only way to remove them is to remove all workspaces and savepoints and when run compression. After that it removes all soft deleted records (records that are marked as deleted in LT table).
I have a thousands active records while hundred of thousands are soft deleted, which causes performance degradation.
Any suggestions?
Thanks for any input.
Edited by: dmbond on Jan 14, 2010 7:15 AM

Answer 1

Thanks Ben for such quick replay.
Please correct my understanding if i wrong somewhere...
From you last post i understood that soft deleted records cannot be removed from versioned table where the same data were existed prior to versioning.
I made a quick test and can see version 0 on the data that was originally there, and running compression did not removed it (choice by OWM).
However, another case when brand new table (empty) was versioned), (new workspace created after versioing), and then new data is added into LIVE which later was removed. After compressing LIVE workspace the soft records still in LT table and version is not 0.
Here is my last test example:
create table dm_test (
column1 number primary key,
column2 number not null);
call dbms_wm.enableVersioning('DM_TEST');
call dbms_wm.createWorkspace('DUMMY');
--No records
select * from dm_test_lt;
insert into dm_test values (9,1);
insert into dm_test values (10,2);
insert into dm_test values (11,3);
insert into dm_test values (12,4);
commit;
--Shows data with version different than 0
select * from dm_test_lt;
--Delete data from LIVE workspace
delete from dm_test;
commit;
--LT has delstatus negative (-1)
select * from dm_test_lt;
--compress LIVE workspace
declare
begin
     DBMS_WM.CompressWorkspace('LIVE',
     compress_view_wo_overwrite => TRUE,
     auto_commit => TRUE,
     remove_latest_deleted_rows=>TRUE);
end;
--The data is still there after compression
select * from dm_test_lt;