[miks]

I have written my own purge package to purge data from the most heavily used tables. The main offenders of disk space are the i_transaction, i_transmission, i_log, i_log_detail, audit_trail and audit_data_info. I pass a parameter into the process to purge data that is beyond X days old. For the i_transaction and i_transmission tables, I null out the XML_BLOB field. The remaining tables, I delete the rows all together. The time frame for keeping data is up to your own preference. Some like to keep as long as 90 days, some like it as low as 21 days. I use the Oracle job scheduler to run the process once a week on the weekends. For very heavy usage, this can be run nightly.

I have found that purging the data is good for keeping storage requirements down. However, I haven't see any great benefit to improve on performance issues, particularly the areas you are seeing. Your problems have little to do with the large transaction type tables in need of purging.

Regardless, purging is still a necessary evil that you should have your DBA setup.

Hope this helps a bit.

- Mike