ORA-00439 Feature Not Enabled when rebuilding index ONLINE

Is it not possible to rebuild an INDEX online in Ora8i standard edition?

I want to rebuild an index but its always busy - I get ORA-00054: resource busy and acquire with NOWAIT specified.

So I attempted ALTER INDEX nnnnn REBUILD ONLINE and got the ORA- 00439 error.

I looked for the index name in v$locked_object view but its not there - the Table the index is based on is there, but not the index. Presumably a transaction has locked the table and thus the index too? (its the PK index for the table).

Do I just wait til the system's quiet?

Online index rebuild is not available in Standard Edition, only in Enterprise and Personal Edition. Check the features availability matrix in http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/.../ch4.htm#74868

So you would have to perform your index rebuild when there is no modifications on your table going on, and you will have to ommit the ONLINE option from your command.