Hi All,
I joined a new organization one week back and I was assigned a task on my very first day. The task is to alter a table which appeared simple at first but as I started working on it I encountered a lot of hurdles.
Here, the table in question is 91 GB is size and it has a identity column with lot of identity gaps which was never fixed until now. The actual issue was that when this table was created the identity column was created with a precision of 10 i.e., numeric(10,0),. The data has grown so much that this range is almost exhausted and hence they want to increase the precision to 12 within next two weeks deadline. To increase the precision they were asking me to alter the table.
If my understanding is correct, altering such a huge table requires space greater than the actual size of the table. If I read the documetation right it should be 120% of the existing table size. I had two thoughts in my mind:
- Fire a alter table with bulkcopy db option enabled or
- bcp out and bcp in the data retaining the existing identity values
Things would have been easier if we had space on the server but I had another surprise, the UAT server had only 20 GB space which is not sufficient for both of the above options. I was frustrated and checked the production server. The production server had 95 GB free space.
Since, my previous ideas are not feasible in the current scenario, I came up with a different solution. My plan was to use SELECT INTO to move data into a new table in production with bulkcopy db option enabled. Once the data is copied, create a clustered index on the table with sorted_data option and drop the old table. My team was convinced with idea as the storage we requested for will take time for approval and be available.
I have one questions here.
1. Once I create the new table, I will be left with only 4 GB space. I have to create a composite clustered index on this new table and I am thinking of creating the index with sorted_data option which will build the index while scanning without doing any copy of the data pages. My understanding is that index creation also needs space but since I am specifying that the data is already sorted it does not to do any copy or move the data pages.
-> Please let me know if my understanding on this point is correct.
The select into query is given below:
select new_identity_column=identity(12),[column_list]
into new_table
from old_table
Sybase ASE version: 12.5.3
The table has 400000000 records at present.
I am still worried about doing this as I did not get a chance to test this in UAT and also I am worried about the log.
Please let me know if my understandings are correct and if there is a better way to do this. I may be completely wrong, please guide me as I am new to Sybase ASE database administration.
Thanks
ADNAN