do you have Tanel Poder's paper on LOB's ? http://www.slideshare.net/tanelp/oracle-lob-internals-and-performance-tuning On the other hand indexes never tend to release space unless rebuild/shrink is executed specifically. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail From: Yechiel Adar <adar666@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: ORACLE-L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: 2011.10.10 15:18 Subject: Release space used by empty BLOB segments I have a partitioned (by week) table that holds data and images. The data is kept for 7 years (banking) while the images are kept only for one year. The images are deleted by updating the fields to empty blobs. The tables has local indexes and a bunch of global indexes. The problem is that the empty blob segments are not released after their content id deleted. 1) How can I release the unused space without making the global indexes unusable? 2) Preferably while the users are working (but this not a must)? BANNER ---------------------------------------------------------------- Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0 - 64bi PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.3.0 - Production CORE 10.2.0.3.0 Production TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.3.0 - Production NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.3.0 - Production -- Yechiel Adar Israel -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l