Large database limitations

I've heard stories to the effect that you shouldn't try to run databases larger than X (where X is 200GBytes -> 400GBytes) unless you're using Oracle Parallel Server.

I can understand that monolithic databases on SMP machines are going to have some long-running processes, like index builds, table loads, etc. But, if you are willing to live with load times measured in days, are there other reasons why you can't run a very large database in a monolithic configuration?

Put another way, if I can configure 2 Terabytes of disk on an SMP, and I can afford to take a week to load it (or recover it), what else am I going to run in to when I try to run a data warehouse?

Thanks. Received on Thu Jan 14 1999 - 08:51:42 CST