Re: Oracle's use of tablespaces

>
> The only reason I can think of why Oracle does things with permanent instead
> of as needed spaces is to make the software more portable. That is, permanent
> tablespaces is a lowest-common-denominator tactic, bringing functions inside
> Oracle that are present in most but not all operating systems to account for
> the OSes where the disk-space-control functions are not present.

I think this is it. VMS had no OS deframentation until recently. I'd NEVER want my DB to be dependent on VMS to allocate and deallocate large chunks of contiguous disk space dynamically on a busy system. It 1) would not dependably find what it needs, and 2) it would make my life as DBA more not less complicated.

Once you learn what the normal structure of your database is, allocating space is not hard. It is true that it is not that efficient in terms of disk space used.

ed

Ed Delaney                                   | Internet: 
Associate Director, Administrative Computing |   edwardd_at_yin.earlham.edu
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