High Water Mark (HWM)

Oracle uses the high water mark to identify the highest amount of space used by a particular segment. It acts as the boundary between used and unused space. As the amount of data grows due to row inserts and updates, the segment's high water mark grows accordingly.
The HIGH WATER MARK is set at the beginning of the segment when the table is created. Deleting

rows will never reset the HWM even if all the rows are deleted from the table. Only the TRUNCATE command will reset the HWM. To reduce the high water mark export / data pump the table, drop it and import it back in again. Suppose we create an empty table, the high-water mark would be at the beginning of the table segment

Unused space
HWM

When you insert rows into the table the high watermark will be bumped up step by step. This is done by the server process which makes the inserts.

Used DATA

Un used Space HWM

Lets assume that we have filled a table with 100000 rows. And lets assume that we deleted 50000 rows afterwards.

Used data

Empty blocks

Un used space

<--------------------------------------------------------------->HWM Full table scan As you seen above by deleting the data, HWM does not move. The main disadvantage of this is that oracle always read the blocks up to high water mark in case of full table scan. You may have ever notice that doing a count (*) on empty table, takes time to show you 0 rows. The reason for delay is setting of HWM at higher position.

NOTE: Whenever optimizer takes full table scan, it scans all the blocks below HWM. This would
degrade the performance and slowdown the Full table scan process. To avoid this, we need to shrink the table to reset the HWM. So, now how we set the high-water mark at lower position? The only way to set the HWM is to truncate a table. Let us see how truncate set the HWM.

No data in the segment

HWM

HWM is reset now, after truncating data. HWMBLOCKS = Blocks Containing data + Empty blocks HWMBLOCKS Blocks containing data HWM % = (----------------------------------) * 100 HWMBLOCKS You can also use DBMS_SPACE.UNUSED_SPACE procedure to determine HWM. High Watermark = Total blocks - Unused blocks 1 SQL> select blocks from dba_segments where owner=upper('HR') and segment_name = upper('JOBS'); SQL> analyze table hr.jobs estimate statistics; SQL> select empty_blocks from dba_tables where owner=upper('HR') and table_name = upper('jobs'); Ways for Resetting HWM.. Option 1 Alter table tab_name move tablespace This option requires rebuilding the indexes. Since the index will be invalid/unusable after running the above command. The downside is, rebuilding the index is additional overhead when we use this option. Also users cannot use the application or reports while rebuilding the index. Option 2 1. Export the data 2. Truncate the table 3. Import the table 4. Analyze the table

Option 3 1. Copy the table data 2. Truncate the original table 3. Insert back. Option 4 Use DBMS_REDEFINITION package to copy the table People confused about setting of HWM through ALTER TABLE DEALLOCATE UNUSED clause. This clause only frees unused space above the high water mark but cannot reset HWM position. Starting with ORACLE 10gR1 we can use a new feature for adjusting the high watermark, it is called segment shrinking and is only possible for segments which use ASSM, in other words, which are located in tablespaces which use Automatic Segement Space Management.