Datafile Resize/Max Extents Question

Firstly, I'm new to Oracle and I'd like to thank everyone that contributes to

this newsgroup- you have helped me immensely.

I have an Agilent Chemstor database running Oracle 7.3.4 on NT 4.0SP6a. When

it was initially set up, the main data collecting tablespace was created

thusly:

15 datafiles of 2GB each
'last' datafile set to extend to 16GB by 1GB increments

The company is only doing cold backups right now- once every Sunday afternoon

the database is manually shutdown and backed up to tape using Backup Exec

8.6. After testing disaster recovery scenarios with Backup Exec it was found

that using hot backups, the database was not recoverable. When I was hired,

I was tasked with making hot backups work. I have written a sql script to

perform the hot backups and run nightly using NT's 'at' command. This is

running wonderfully on a replica test box I have been using. The only

problem is, it is taking a little over five hours nightly because of all of

the 'empty' data I'm backing up. There is one datafile that has been filled

and one other that is about half-filled(1GB). So essentially, I'm backing up

30GB to get 3GB of data.

On my test system I resized the empty datafiles to 200MB each and set extents

of 200MB to a maximum size of 2GB each. I used Oracle's Storage Manager to

do this and it worked seemlessly.

My question is this(finally):

This will give me about 135 extents for this single tablespace- is that too

many? Also, should I use Server Manager or SQLplus to resize the datafiles

instead of Storage Manager? What should I do about the 'last' datafile that

is set to extend to 16GB? That seems inexcuseable to me.

Again, thanks to all.

Later, gary.
klokwerks_at_yahoo.com Received on Tue Dec 18 2001 - 12:14:15 CST