newbie5, for sure in some situations not using autoextend can be useful, for some business need you can NEED to know how much space will go for what, example : I have in my system (a dw-like one) all the big tables partitioned by a date column, receiving data from foreigno sources I need to plan disk space usage forewards and I have only a few filesystems - if I do not use autoextending, pre-creating the datafiles for the next months, anytime when the damagement asks "what space we have for months x, y or z" it is very direct to do a sum of bytes in dba_datafiles and I have an exact and precise answer, I can grow or shrink it as needed, and I do NOT need to "receive" the data for Oracle grows... With autoextend I must respond "we have x free bytes, BUT I don´t know exactly HOW MUCH I can spare for months x or y, the space will be consumed as needed", many times damagement do not want/accept it in this way...

For performance, no : autoextending or not gives you more or less the same thing - maybe in a very very busy system the time needed to autoextend a datafile can be of concern, but this is something exceptional, in my experience... And even there, nothing stops you from pre-allocating some space in the busiest objects.

[]s

Chiappa