Minimal Performance Overhead

OLTP Table Compression has no adverse impact on read operations. There is additional work performed while writing data, making it impossible to eliminate performance overhead for write operations. Oracle compresses blocks in batch mode rather than compressing data every time a write operation takes place. A newly initialized block remains uncompressed until data in the block reaches an internally controlled threshold. When a transaction causes the data in the block to reach this threshold, all contents of the block are compressed. Subsequently, as more data are added to the block and the threshold is again reached, the entire block is recompressed to achieve the highest level of compression. This process repeats until Oracle determines that the block can no longer benefit from further compression. Only transactions that trigger the compression of the block will experience the slight compression overhead. Therefore, a majority of OLTP transactions on compressed blocks will have the exact same performance as they would with uncompressed blocks.