Database files on optical disks

Greetings,

Has anyone had any experience of storing oracle data files on optical disks. Our situation is this:

we would like to store around 10Gb per year of scanned images and be able to access them through our Oracle DB. We are putting in a magneto-optical jukebox (40Gb) for bulk storage. The jukebox is driven by VLFS software, which migrates files from magnetic to rewritabe optical disks on demand transperantly to the user. As I understand the technology (which may not be entirely correct!) Oracle opens all its datafiles when the database starts up. If they are on the optical disks, the OS will first copy the file onto magnetic. To do this it must make space by moving files off megnetic onto another optical disk. Oracle can then open the file. Oracle then tries to open the next file, which is on optical disk. First the OS moves the previous file back to optical to create space, then loads the required file onto magnetic, and oracle can open it... This process continues until 5 or 6 hours later all the 40Gb of datafiles have been opened. Moments later, someone forces a checkpoint, and 40 Gb of data needs to be read and written again. (another 5-6 hours).

Am I totally on the wrong track, or is the sort of problem I will run into.

Our other option is to store the images in binary files on disk and just have indexing of file names stored in the database. (This is the method we are using currently, but may like to change.

Any ideas would be helpful.

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