Abraham >Well, something that I've noticed with regular dumps is that when you >update a null column in a record, the whole row is migrated within the >block to a new location and the space in never reused... I want to use >bbed to see if that is true... I agree with you, one of the major problem of regular dumps is that they = are formatted and some information is lost. For this reason, sometimes, = I use BBED to dump the block in hex... Now, about your problem of free space... When you update a row and its size is bigger then before, the updated = row is moved at the end of the free space at the top of the block. The = old position become free (it's basically a hole between the rows...).=20 When at the beginning of the block not enough free space is available, = the block is reorganized, i.e. all rows are packet to the end of the = block. Then the updated rows can be placed in the free space at the top. Of course if the reorganization doesn't help or no holes are available, = the row is migrated to another block. The original block will contain a = simple pointer to the new location and some free space (another hole...) = will be available. HTH Chris -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l