datafile size limit for Oracle 8i on Windows 2000

Does anyone know the maximum size for Oracle 8i datafiles on Windows 2000?

Thank you.

Hi,
There is no Oracle limit to the file size on W2K. Whether having multiple files will help your performance really depends on the situation. In many cases, users like to split tablespaces into multiple files so they can put the files on different disks and thus distribute the I/O. By the same theory, tables can be striped across disks within these multiple datafiles causing users to access multiple disks.If you are asking about a Win2K limit, it is up in the exabytes.

Regards,
Rohit Nirkhe,Oracle/Apps DBA,OCP 8i
oracle-support@indiatimes.com

As a matter of supportability I tend to not create datafiles of more than 2 or 4 Gb -- any bigger than that is just inconvenient to backup and store, or move around between machines or disk arrays. Consider also that when backing up the files of a 20Gb tablespace on a RAID array, you would do better to copy five 4Gb files all at the same time than one single 20Gb file.

What if my datafiles are located across a RAID 5 or RAID 0+1 array? Does it still matter whether I have one big datafile for a tablespace or several smaller ones?

Also, if I have several smaller files for a tablespace to copy over and I am copying all at the same time, won't that make the files fragmented on the destination drive?

Thanks,