Dropping DMS containers

Dropping a container is allowed only if the number of extents being dropped by the operation is less than or equal to the number of free extents above the high-water mark in the table space. This restriction is necessary because page numbers cannot be changed by the operation and therefore all extents up to and including the high-water mark must sit in the same logical position within the table space. Therefore, the resulting table space must have enough space to hold all of the data up to and including the high-water mark. In the situation where there is not enough free space, you receive an error immediately upon execution of the statement.

When containers are dropped, the remaining containers are renumbered such that their container IDs start at 0 and increase by 1. If all of the containers in a stripe set are dropped, the stripe set is removed from the map and all stripe sets following it in the map are shifted down and renumbered such that there are no gaps in the stripe set numbers.