DBMS_REDEFINITION, clustering and how an outline helps to make it completely ONLINE

At last a new post from my hand after months of silence. Well, silence in writing then: in the mean time we got our third child and I participated in the World Championships Double Decathlon in Delft. Those two things were enough for me to handle next to regular work 😉

In this post I want to share good experience I had in the use of DBMS_REDEFINITION to speed up the Siebel OLTP application I am responsible for (at least, for the performance part of it). It is about clustering of data and rebuilding tables as ONLINE as can be and how I used a trick with a stored outline to overcome a performance problem during rebuild of one table.