If you have been reading my current series on data warehouse design you will have read (or perhaps soon will, as there is also a new piece in preparation!) that a good technique in the batch process is to disable bitmap indexes during an insert and then rebuild them after the insert is complete.

Inspecting the work of another company for a customer I came across a nice Oracle package to handle the niceties of index manipulation in a DW. Two procedures in the package body caught my eye: Disable_indexes and enable_indexes. Well that sounds good…

… except for the code!

• disable_indexes invokes a cursor loop to go through all the indexes in USER_INDEXES and does an execute immediate DROP index for each index
• enable_indexes writes a message to a log file saying ‘This code is not implemented’

Nice!