STORAGE

Storage in an oracle database goes something like this ...

An oracle database is made up of one (two from 10g) or tablespaces. Each tablespace can have one or more datafiles. A datafile can be a file or pointer to a raw device or use ASM (automatic storage management).

When creating a tablespace you can specify locally managed or dictionary managed. Local managed should mean quicker dictionary response as all the info relating to extents held in the tablespaces etc are held in the tablespace and not the data dictionary.

When creating locally managed tablespaces, you have the option of setting the extents to uniform or automatic. I always think uniform is the best then you can control what segments go into what tablespace. This is probably quite old school, but there you go.