The introduction of the temp tablespace was a crucial step in the RDBMS to separating  the “work area” for sorting and specific join operations from permanent segments.   To eliminate the performance challenges of sorts and hash against the I/O threshold involved with performing this word in the temp tablespace, Oracle 9i introduced the Program Global Area, (PGA) to complete sorts and hashes within memory. DBA’s spent considerable time tuning the PGA, attempting to continually ensure that as more complex sorting and join features emerged, that these processes would complete their work within the PGA and not require such a large…