Tom - I'm dropping and rebuliding some indexes on a 150 million row table. The indexes are generally 4-7 standard columns. By standard I mean varchar2's and numbers of fairly typical width. I know you prefer online rebuilds but we don't have enough room. (Different issue). Anyhow, these index rebuilds on the hardware I am on take about 1 1/2 - 2 hours a piece. So, the index build can sometimes be like watching paint dry because I'm rarely sure how much progess is being made. Generally, I notice that the used_blocks in v$sort_segment generally increases for an hour to a plateau. Occassionaly, this bumps up or down a bit but generally it's fairly steady after a certain point. Then, it looks like it finishes very suddenly - the index is built and ends up taking space in the index tablespace. Up until that point, the index tablespace segments don't really budge. Questions are - do these observations seem accurate? Is there anything I can observe after the temp space seems to have "maxed".. to check for progress?

Thanks.