While developers have some amount of control over the use of interim segments, many applications, along with their massive redo generation requirements, are simply transitioned over to the DBAs, who are told to somehow just make them perform. Global temporary tables give the DBA a near-application-level tool, which can be used to possibly avoid significant and painful application changes.

Global temporary tables share many standard data segment and temporary segment characteristics, such as the following:

* They can be created by a session using a create table variant. For example, instead of create table customers, the syntax could be create global temporary table customers.