No limit on the no. of datafiles other than the maxfiles limit you mention in the 'create database' statement.

Size of the datafiles depends on the On the OS API, which differes from different versions of OS. There is a link/thread in past 10 days myself as participant which talks about the size of datafiles on different OS`s. Smallest size you can allocate for a datafile is i think couple of blocks(not sure). But, if your datafiles is less than 5 blocks oracle will not use it for data storage.

Personally I prefer 2GB as size of datafile which makes me comfortable deal with multi boxes/portability of the database on diffrent boxes.

I don't see the advantage or disadvantage with no. of datafiles and size(Provided datafiles are spread evenly for efficient I/O) except its easy to deal with few and big datafiles for transfer and backup,recovery rather lot smaller datafiles.

[url]http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_documents.showDocument?p_database_id=NOT&p_id=62409.1[/url]

[Edited by sreddy on 01-21-2001 at 08:58 PM]