how to prevent ORA-28604: table too fragmented to build bitmap index

 Hello.

I have hit this error when trying to rebuild a bitmap index on a small (300K rows) table. Based on oracle's documents, I need to defragment this table. It is easy to do on a small table like this. But is there a way to prevent this issue? Had it been a production and had it been a larger table, it would have been a big issue.  I am running oracle 10.2.0.3

thank you

Gene