For those not familiar with Richard Foote’s extensive blog about indexes (and if you’re not you should be) – the title of this note is a blatant hi-jacking of his preferred naming mechanism.

It’s just a short note to remind myself (and my readers) that anything you know about Oracle, and anything published on the Internet – even by Oracle Corp. and its employees – is subject to change without notice (and sometimes without being noticed). I came across one such change today while read the Expert Oracle Exadatabook by Kerry Osborne, Randy Johnson and Tanel Poder. It was just a little throwaway comment to the effect that:

In NOARCHIVELOG mode all bulk operations (such as INSERT, APPEND, index REBUILD and ALTER TABLE MOVE) are automatically nologging.

The obvious error there is the reference to “index REBUILD”. Although create table as select and alter table move default to nologging (when running in noarchivelog mode) the equivalent commands for indexes have always been logged. On the other hand, pausing for thought here, I wouldn’t expect such an obvious error to slip past all three authors and the technical reviewers so, before opening my mouth and putting my foot firmly into it, I decided to run a quick test and, almost inevitably, I have a handy test script that I’ve been running intermittently for years for exactly this test case.

Read the fullpost on my blog.