Monday, March 2, 2015

DBMS_INDEX_UTL

Here the other day I came across this package in a PL/SQL procedure written by someone else. From the name I reckoned it was a standard package from Oracle, but I had never seen it before. It is not mentioned in the manual Database PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference, and I could not find much about it at My Oracle Support either. Anyway, with SQL Developer you'll get what you need by hitting Shift-F4 (with the cursor at the name of the package). The API is pretty good documented in the comments. The package is used to rebuild indexes, either for a named table, a named schema, or a list of indexes plus some stuff I didn't bother to look into.

Now, there may be a reason why this is not well documented and better known.