Why is Temporary tablespace so full

Question

I have a temporary table space that is 27GB but I cant make out what is using the space. The only object looks to be an object called SYS.3.2.
Please could somebody help me how to shirnk this back to a sensible size.
Details of the tablespace setup are shown below.
Object Name TEMP
Object Type Tablespace
Datasource Z5_IPPERS ( Oracle 8.1.7.0.0 )
Login sys
Report Date 14/06/2002 10:14:48.741
Status ONLINE
Use Logging Yes
Content TEMPORARY
Datafile temp01.dbf
Size 28118016.00 K
Sections 1
Total Free Space 6200.00MB
Largest Free Section 6200.31MB
Fragmentation Index 100.00
Management Type DICTIONARY
Allocation Type AUTOMATIC
Min Extents 1
Max Extents 0
Initial Extent 64 K
Next Extent 64 K
Minimum Extent Size 1048576 K
Percent Increase 1 %
Object Placement
Object Name Object Type Size
SYS.3.2 TEMPORARY 946160.00 KB

Answer 1

I have a temporary table space that is 27GB but I cant make out what is using the space. The only object looks to be an object called SYS.3.2.
Please could somebody help me how to shirnk this back to a sensible size.
Details of the tablespace setup are shown below.
Object Name TEMP
Object Type Tablespace
Datasource Z5_IPPERS ( Oracle 8.1.7.0.0 )
Login sys
Report Date 14/06/2002 10:14:48.741
Status ONLINE
Use Logging Yes
Content TEMPORARY
Datafile temp01.dbf
Size 28118016.00 K
Sections 1
Total Free Space 6200.00MB
Largest Free Section 6200.31MB
Fragmentation Index 100.00
Management Type DICTIONARY
Allocation Type AUTOMATIC
Min Extents 1
Max Extents 0
Initial Extent 64 K
Next Extent 64 K
Minimum Extent Size 1048576 K
Percent Increase 1 %
Object Placement
Object Name Object Type Size
SYS.3.2 TEMPORARY 946160.00 KB Andy,
A couple things to check first. What is you setting in the init.ora for sort_area_size and sort_area_retained_size? Whatever they are, try to increase them a lot. You probably have a lot of writes to disk in the TEMP tablespace as opposed to keeping this sorted data in memory. I see you have pctincrease set to 1 which is good as it is supposed to signal SMON to clean up. If SMON is not, there are a couple other options. Shutdown the db. OK not always an option but it works. Second is to create another smaller TEMP tablespace and bring it online and redirect user to that tbs, then offline immediate and drop the original and recreate it, and then point users back to it. You could also make it completely temporary by assigning it a TEMP file rather than a datafile. But considr to inability to recover in case of a crash before doing this.
This problem is experienced by almost every DBA and is considered a 'feature' not a 'bug' by Oracle. OK but if you think about what Oracle actually does compared to what it could do 10 years ago you wouldn't complain so much.
If I were you, I'd increase sort-area-size and sort-area-retained-size to help sorts stay in memory as opposed to being written to disk. Then consider dropping and recreatin the tbs either manually or through a nightly script/job so it doesn't grow out of control
Hope this helps
The Infamous
Eric Cartman