Re: Oracle's use of tablespaces

holowcza_at_andromeda.rutgers.edu (Richard D Holowczak) writes:

>grimes_at_access.digex.net (Seth Grimes) writes:
 

>>Why does Oracle use tablespaces? On the balance, they seem unnecessarily
>>complicated given the advantages they offer.
 

> What would you do with the freed space if you had it ? You probably
> would not want to use it up since the next time you wish to run a
> query you'll need it back.

Use it for other software. For instance, my office runs SAS, which needs temporary space for some of the same reasons Oracle does, e.g., sorting, temporary tables, etc. Why shouldn't Oracle share that space with SAS?

> What happens when you guess wrong and the OS can't grab the space it
> needs ? What should the query do ? Abort ? In a real production
> environment, this kind of mistake can be very costly. I think Oracle
> is just taking the safest road. Make sure space is available no
> matter what else is going on.

As I described, this did happen to me: I had a query that required a large amount of working space so I had to create a big (50 megabyte) TEMP tablespace. As it was, before I did this, the query aborted.

The point is, why aren't tablespaces based on *quotas* instead of on grabbing the space? If having the space available is that critical, then I would dedicate a device not shared by other software to Oracle tablespace or set the quotas on other software sharing the device with Oracle low enough so that they won't affect Oracle operations.

                                Seth

>Rich Holowczak
>Rutgers University
>holowcza_at_andromeda.rutgers.edu
Received on Mon Aug 30 1993 - 16:43:43 CEST