But if there is a pre-existing index that contains all the data needed to enforce the constraint Oracle shouldn't need to do any sorting, it need only do a full scan of the index to check that there are no duplicates. Regards Jonathan Lewis http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/all_postings Author: Oracle Core (Apress 2011) http://www.apress.com/9781430239543 ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Fitzjarrell" <oratune@xxxxxxxxx> To: <mark.powell2@xxxxxx>; "oracle-l" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 9:31 PM Subject: Re: Temporary space needed to create a constraint Which is exactly what he's done -- the constraint creation runs out of temp space even though no index is being created. The sort segment outgrows the available temp space and then errors out. I can guess that Oracle is ordering the keys to verify no duplicates exist before creating and enforcing the primary key, but I can't prove that on my small playground database. David Fitzjarrell -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l