Tablespace....contents=TEMPORARY.. how long will data reside here??

Question

Hello all,
While creating a tablespace we have the option, PERMANENT OR TEMPORARY.
Well, in the oracle 8.1.6 db that i have; the temporary tablespace is like this... A tablespace was created with TEMPORARY and it is used as the temp tablespace.
So unlike with the original temp tablespace(create temporary tablespace...), i just cannot drop the datafiles of this tablespace once they become large.
If i have created a tablespace with TEMPORARY, how long will the data stay there ??
TIA,
J J

Answer 1

For a dictionary managed tablespace defined to be temporary, the sort extents might not be de-allocated while the instance is running, but are marked as free and can be re-used as required which would mean that the sort segment could potentially grow. The Oracle server stores the information about the sort segment in the Sort Extent Pool which is part of the System Global Area (SGA). Every statement that needs to sort in the temporary tablespace checks this part of the SGA for free extents thereby eliminating the need for frequent allocation and de-allocation which in turn reduces the contention due to the ST enqueue.
The SMON process is responsible for the cleanup up of the temporary segments within dictionary managed temporary tablespaces and is something that usually happens during instance startup. If you want to forcefully wakeup the SMON process to do the cleanup then you can maybe change the storage attributes like the maxextents of the temporary tablespace (change it to some number and then put it back to unlimited and give it a minute) and this might trigger the SMON to do the cleanup.
Good luck......