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The secrets of oracle bitmap indexes

Overview
Oracle's two major index types are Bitmap
indexes and B-Tree indexes. B-Tree indexes are
the regular type that OLTP systems make much
use of, and bitmap indexes are a highly
compressed index type that tends to be used
primarily for data warehouses.

Characteristic of Bitmap Indexes

For columns with very few unique values

(low cardinality)

Columns that have low cardinality are

good candidates (if the cardinality of
a column is <= 0.1 % that the column
is ideal candidate, consider also 0.2%
– 1%)

Tables that have no or little

insert/update are good candidates (static
data in warehouse)

Stream of bits: each bit relates to a

column value in a single row of table

create bitmap index person_region on

person (region);

Row Region North

East West South
1 North 1
0 0 0
2 East 0
1 0 0
3 West 0
0 1 0
4 West 0
 0 1 0
5 South 0
0 0 1
6 North 1
0 0 0

Advantage of Bitmap Indexes

The advantages of them are that they have a

highly compressed structure, making them fast
to read and their structure makes it possible
for the system to combine multiple indexes
together for fast access to the underlying
table.

Compressed indexes, like bitmap indexes,

represent a trade-off between CPU usage and
disk space usage. A compressed structure is
faster to read from disk but takes additional
CPU cycles to decompress for access - an
uncompressed structure imposes a lower CPU
load but requires more bandwidth to read in a
short time.

One belief concerning bitmap indexes is that

they are only suitable for indexing low-
cardinality data. This is not necessarily
true, and bitmap indexes can be used very
successfully for indexing columns with many
thousands of different values.

Disadvantage of Bitmap Indexes

The reason for confining bitmap indexes to

data warehouses is that the overhead on
maintaining them is enormous. A modification
to a bitmap index requires a great deal more
work on behalf of the system than a
modification to a b-tree index. In addition,
the concurrency for modifications on bitmap
indexes is dreadful.

Bitmap Indexes and

Deadlocks
Bitmap indexes are not appropriate for tables that
have lots of single row DML operations (inserts) and
especially concurrent single row DML operations.
Deadlock situations are the result of concurrent
inserts as the following example shows: Open two
windows, one for Session 1 and one for Session 2

Session 1 Session 2
create table bitmap_index_demo
(
value varchar2(20)
);
insert into bitmap_index_demo
select
decode(mod(rownum,2),0,'M','F')
from all_objects;
create bitmap index
bitmap_index_demo_idx
on bitmap_index_demo(value);
insert into bitmap_index_demo
values ('M');
1 row created.
insert into
bitmap_index_demo
values ('F');
1 row created.
insert into bitmap_index_demo
values ('F');
...... waiting ......
ERROR at line 1: insert into
ORA-00060: deadlock detected bitmap_index_demo
while waiting for resource values ('M');
...... waiting
......