Oracle Tablespace Management Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

Oracle Features for the Data Warehouse

Oracle Tablespace Management

Unlike the CODASYL databases of the 1980s, today's Oracle databases allow for tables to grow according to specified rules and procedures. In the Oracle model, one or more tables may reside in a tablespace. A tablespace is a predefined container for the tables that map to fixed files of a finite size. Tables that are assigned to the tablespace may grow according to the growth rules that are specified, but the size of the tablespace supersedes the expansion rules. In other words, a table may have more extents available according to the table definition, but there may not be room in the tablespace to allocate those extents.

Several Oracle parameters influence the growth of tables within a tablespace:

* DB_BLOCK_SIZE--The size of each physical database block

* INITIAL--The initial size of each extent

* NEXT--The subsequent size of new extents

* MINEXTENTS--The minimum number of initial extents (used for striping)

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This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing", copyright 1997.

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