Oracle does return space to OS

Question

Dear Friends,
Pls help me with the following situation.
I have deleted an unwanted table which is having about 1.5GB of data from my oracle 8i production server, because I want some space in my solaris server.
After deleting the rows in the table, using user_extents I found the space is only 80 MB, but my solaris box is still showing the same % of free space.
I first truncated the table and then copied back only the required rows.
What else I need to do?

Answer 1

Since the space is returned to Oracle only and the underlying datafile is still occupying space on the disk, the OS will not see the free space (but Oracle will).
As suggested, if absolutely necessary to get some free space on the server, you would need to RESIZE the datafile associated with the tablespace. But, you may have to reorg the datafile before you could do that (you may get the following error message):
03297, 00000, "file contains used data beyond requested RESIZE value"
// *Cause:  Some portion of the file in the region to be trimmed is
//          currently in use by a database object
// *Action: Drop or move segments containing extents in this region prior to
//          resizing the file, or choose a resize value such that only free
//          space is in the trimmed.