OCI Bulk updates + Bitmap index growth

[Serge Aleynikov]

Perhaps someone has an advice in the following situation:

We have two Oracle 8.1.6.1 servers with identical installations and
schemas. One (Server A) is running on a 4 CPU Dell server with 2G of RAM
connected to EMC with 256G. The second one (Server B) is a more simple
machine with 4CPU, 512M RAM and 100G Raid 1+0 (in both cases).

Both servers have a table WAREHOUSE partitioned by date in a tablespace
with 10M init, and 10M next extents. The table has 3 B-Tree (same
tablespace) and 6 BITMAP local indexes in a different table space (1M
init, 1M next extent). Each partition in the table has about 3,000,000
rows.

The client application is loading data using OCI interface doing DML
Array inserts / updates
(insert into WAREHOUSE values (:a, :b, ...) -- where :a, :b ... are DML
array bind variables).

Problem: Server A demonstrates an accelerated growth of extents on
BITMAP indexes such that it drops the speed of loading/updating
drastically. Server B doesn't have such an accelerated growth of
indexes.

Ideally, I would drop indexes on a partition prior to inserting/updating
and then recreated them when done. Unfortunately Oracle doesn't allow
index partition drops.

Questions:
1. What can be recommended to slow down the growth of Bitmap index
extents?
2. How can I figure out why two servers exibit different extent growth
factor?
3. Is there a way to temporary disable local partition indexes during
such loading/updating operation?

Please send a reply to my e-mail: se...@hq.idt.net

Thank you.

Serge