Hi all,
In our SAP databases we have 7 tables plus the indexes that have the INITRANS set to 100. Looks like this setting was update in order to avoid deadlocks and appliying the SAP note 84348.
We have tried to figured out why, how and when this setting was updated but we haven't have success. Can be done years ago and it is not documented in any place (Change management issue 
).
The tables that have the INITRANS to 100 are "couriously" the biggest tables and the tables with the biggest growth trend, thing that makes a lot of sense because of this setting.
Two of the tables are MSEG and MKPF (material documents) and as per our application team, these tables should have any UPDATE process against. In addition in the Share Cursor Cache and DB statistics there isn't any update operation aginst these tables in the last months.
With these circumstances and In order to reduce the space after a very deep archive process we are thinking about to reorg the tables reducing the INITRANS to 1.
Here several questions and thoughts regarding this topic:
- Does the INITRANS apply only for UPDATE operations? Im my eyes yes, but I'd like to confirm it.
- If one table has the INITRANS to 100 during long time and after that you reorg the table reducing the INITRANS to 100, should the table size be reduced? this is my thought and please let me know if I'm wrong:
if a table with 1000 blocks and INITRANS = 100 is reorganized and the INITRANS reduced to 1, will its size reduced in 207000? ((23bytes*100)*1000) - (23bytes *1000) = 207.000 bytes.
- If the INITRANS is changed in a table without reorg and after sometime the table is reorg keepping the INITRANS, will its size increased because the INITRANS will be applied to all blocks?
Thanks in advanced.