Anyone User Oracle Table Compression?

I just read an article on Oracle's table compression feature. This feature stores table data in a compressed format. It would be useful in our environment. I am curious if anyone has any experience with this feature? Is it ready for prime time?

Sure, for data warehouse fact tables it's very effective. For OLTP tables it's less so, partly because you need to use direct path insert to achieve compression, and partly because OLTP systems generally query individual rows.

There's a few "gotcha's" -- can't add or drop columns from them, for one thing.

Compression doesn't do lob's of any flavor.

The compression is done on block level and it's not the same type of compression algorithm as the one used by 'zip' or 'gzip' but a simple symbol table lookup.

So I dont see how a lob could be compressed using this kind of compression methode.

Yup, that's right.