Managing Tablespaces and Datafiles in Oracle

Tablespace And Datafile Management in Oracle - Full Explanation

Using multiple tablespaces provides several Advantages

Separate user data from data dictionary data to reduce contention among dictionary objects and schema objects for the same datafiles.

Separate data of one application from the data of another to prevent multiple applications from being affected if a tablespace must be taken offline.

Store different the datafiles of different tablespaces on different disk drives to reduce I/O contention.

Take individual tablespaces offline while others remain online, providing better overall availability.

Creating  New Tablespaces

You can create Locally Managed or Dictionary Managed Tablespaces. In prior versions of Oracle only Dictionary managed Tablespaces were available but from Oracle ver. 8i you can also create Locally Managed tablespaces. The advantages of locally managed tablespaces are

Locally managed tablespaces track all extent information in the tablespace itself by using bitmaps, resulting in the following benefits:

Concurrency and speed of space operations is improved, because space allocations and deallocations modify locally managed resources (bitmaps stored in header files) rather than requiring centrally managed resources such as enqueues

Performance is improved, because recursive operations that are sometimes required during dictionary-managed space allocation are eliminated

To create a locally managed tablespace give the following command

SQL> CREATE TABLESPACE ica_lmts DATAFILE '/u02/oracle/ica/ica01.dbf' 

SIZE 50M EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL AUTOALLOCATE;

AUTOALLOCATE causes the tablespace to be system managed with a minimum extent size of 64K.

The alternative to AUTOALLOCATE is UNIFORM. which specifies that the tablespace is managed with extents of uniform size. You can specify that size in the SIZE clause of UNIFORM. If you omit SIZE, then the default size is 1M. The following example creates a Locally managed tablespace with uniform extent size of 256K

SQL> CREATE TABLESPACE ica_lmt DATAFILE '/u02/oracle/ica/ica01.dbf' SIZE

 50M EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL UNIFORM SIZE 256K;

To Create Dictionary Managed Tablespace

SQL> CREATE TABLESPACE ica_lmt DATAFILE '/u02/oracle/ica/ica01.dbf' SIZE

 50M EXTENT MANAGEMENT DICTIONARY;

Bigfile Tablespaces (Introduced in Oracle Ver. 10g)

A bigfile tablespace is a tablespace with a single, but very large (up to 4G blocks) datafile. Traditional smallfile tablespaces, in contrast, can contain multiple datafiles, but the files cannot be as large. Bigfile tablespaces can reduce the number of datafiles needed for a database.

To create a bigfile tablespace give the following command

SQL> CREATE BIGFILE TABLESPACE ica_bigtbs  DATAFILE '/u02/oracle/ica/big

tbs01.dbf' SIZE 50G;