Re: What is against autoextending datafiles? (was: autoextend = ???

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001 08:08:16 +1000, "Howard J. Rogers" <howardjr_at_www.com> wrote:

>In short, autoextend tells me that the DBA can't quite summon up the energy
>to proactively monitor his space usage, which is just sloppy DBAing, and
>that the performance issue for his users is less important to him than his
>own convenience.

In many smaller places the DBA position is filled by a part time fellow who have a lot of other duties to attend to. The auto extend feature can, like so many things in Oracle be misused, but a responsible person who understand the issues can have good use of the auto extend feature. As you describe very precisely in the following :
>
>I confess, however, to having switched autoextend on for all my datafiles
>when going away for a two week holiday, and turning it off again when I got
>back. I'd rather the application kept running, however poorly, than keeling
>over through lack of space (and my mobile phone going off whilst on the
>beach).
>
>I'd also allow that a DBA looking after 50 databases might not have the time
>to closely monitor space availability in all of them, and in that sort of
>situation, autoextend is perhaps a *necessary* convenience.
>
>But if it is going to be used, it's crucial that there is a 'NEXT' clause
>used, so that the thing doesn't continually try and grab tiny bits of extra
>disk space. Instead it should acquire juicy great chunks each time (I seem
>to recall a 'NEXT 100M' every time I went on holiday). And I'd not abandon
>the entire disk to said files, so a 'MAXSIZE' clause is pretty much a
>requirement.

Fully agree. A quite short performance slip once a month shouldn't be a big problem in most small environments (<100 users). And it can reduce the necessary monitoring of tablespaces to maybe once a week. - very important for a busy part-time DBA !

Yours Hans Erik Busk
tbf_at_cn.stam.dk Received on Thu Apr 05 2001 - 06:44:04 CDT