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What does external fragmentation mean?

April 26, 2017external fragmentation mean

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What does external fragmentation mean?

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External fragmentation means that the freespace in a tablespace is not contiguous; instead, there are several freespace fragments that appear between the allocated extents. Due to external fragmentation, overflow errors may occur even though sufficient freespace apparently still exists for a new extent. You can use the following statement to determine the existing freespace fragments in a tablespace: SELECT BYTES FROM DBA_FREE_SPACE WHERE TABLESPACE_NAME = ‘‘ ORDER BY BYTES ASC; The lowest value specifies the highest freespace fragment that exists in the tablespace. An overflow error may occur if Oracle tries to allocate an extent in this tablespace that is higher than the highest freespace fragment.