Query needed to find reclaimable space in db

Question

10.2.0.4
Linux 4.
Hi.
On a test database I suspect there are a lot of objects that are not needed that are taking up valuable disk space. These may include tables that are backups of tables etc.
Does anyone have a tested query to seek out these objects? They will have probably been named test, or backup, etc.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Apparently you want to find candidate junk objects to discard. This is a quite specific subset of the overall issue of finding reclaimable space. In the overall issue a lot of attention should be paid to whether temporarily supressing some free space (due to massive deletions, for example) is worthwhile. In the subset you inquire about, if you can identify the junk it is almost certainly a win to discard it. Some shops have naming standards for objects not officially sanctioned in the production schema. My favorite is the prefix JUNK_<initials>_, so that all the objects can be found quickly with the wildcard on the efficient end of the query, as in:
select owner,object_name,object_type
   from dba_objects
   where object_name like 'JUNK%'
   order by object_name;
or
select owner,object_name,object_type
   from dba_objects
   where object_name like 'JUNK_MWF%'
   order by object_name;Even just the naming convention makes it easy to identify candidate objects, and if you have rules about creating "JUNK" objects such as maintaining a log with expiration dates and purposes, then further inquiry is easy. Having the object's sponsor's initials at hand makes a personal interview possible if the log entries are not useful, and if an expiration date is provided you can simply use the log table as a list to control deleting discardable objects.
In your case you are dealing with catching the horses after the stalls and barn door were left open. Up to now I've written more about closing the barn door for future efforts.
For the cleanup, the similar query with the like predicate '%TEST' and other candidate name templates should suffice. Depending on how creative folks have been spelling TST and BCKUP, you may want to play with the regex functions. Just be sure to treat the generated list as a list of candidates. Depending on the length of the list you can then either generate the appropriate drop statement by type or simply type them into a file for review and execution. Sending out the list of objects to be deleted with a reasonable warning period is highly recommended, since having the ability to create unknown objects often implies sufficient rank to ignore organizational rules. Whether creating an individual object export prior to the drop will vary from site to site and by the size of the object to be dropped.
Good luck,
mwf (aka pudge)