My Oracle Support Banner

Do Not Use Parallel Query In ALTER TABLE MODIFY (column Not Null) (Doc ID 2264469.1)

Last updated on OCTOBER 16, 2019

Applies to:

Oracle Database - Enterprise Edition - Version 12.2.0.1 and later
Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Machine - Version N/A and later
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Database Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service - Version N/A and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Symptoms

NOTE: In the images and/or the document content below, the user information and data used represents fictitious data from the Oracle sample schema(s) or Public Documentation delivered with an Oracle database product.  Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended in any manner.

You are modifying table with mutli billion rows.  Specific column was nullable and became not null

The time to change constraint takes  around 40 minutes.

Mainly due to execution

SELECT /* all_rows ordered dynamic_sampling(2) */ A.rowid,:1,:2,:3 from "<user_name>"."<table_name>" A WHERE ( "<COL1>" is NULL)

this query is running without parallelism

You specifically run
ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL DML PARALLEL 8
/
ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL QUERY PARALLEL 8
/
ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL DDL PARALLEL 8
/

But it still does not use parallelism

Any option to force parallelism?

Changes

 

Cause

To view full details, sign in with your My Oracle Support account.

Don't have a My Oracle Support account? Click to get started!

In this Document
Symptoms
Changes
Cause
Solution


My Oracle Support provides customers with access to over a million knowledge articles and a vibrant support community of peers and Oracle experts.