newb here, We have an old Oracle 10g instance that they have to keep alive until it is replaced. The nightly jobs have been very slow causing some issues. Every other Week there is a large process that does large amounts of DML (deletes, inserts, updates). Some of these tables have 2+ million rows. I noticed that some of the tables the HWM is higher than expected and in Toad I ran a database advisor check that recommended shrinking some tables, but I am concerned that the tables may need the space for DML operations or will shrinking them make the process faster or slower?
We cannot add cpu due to licensing costs
In general, shrinking tables or rebuilding indexes should speed up reads of the table, or anything that does full table scans. It should not affect other DML operations.
When selecting or searching data, all of the empty blocks in the table and any indexes used by the query must still be read, so rebuilding them to reduce empty space and lower the high water mark will generally improve performance. This is especially true in indexes, where space lost to deleted rows is not recovered for reuse.