Frequently Asked Questions About Updating the Index

Answer: The less often you run reindexing with CTX_DDL.SYNC_INDEX, the less fragmented your indexes will be, and the less you will need to optimize them.

However, this means that your data will become progressively more out of date, which may be unacceptable for your users.

Overnight indexing is acceptable for many systems. In this case, data that is less than a day old is not searchable. Other systems use hourly, ten minute, or five minute updates.

Answer: The best way is to time some queries, run index optimization, then time the same queries (restarting the database to clear the SGA each time, of course). If the queries speed up significantly, then optimization was worthwhile. If they don't, you can wait longer next time.

You can also use CTX_REPORT.INDEX_STATS to analyze index fragmentation.

Answer: Yes, the same way as for normal indexing. There are often far fewer records to be indexed during a synchronize operation, so it is not usually necessary to provide hundreds of megabytes of indexing memory.