Hi,
There were time where a file count not be larger than 2GB on some systems.
There were time where big files were difficult to manage (to copy, to transfer,...)
And then you preferred having several files.
There were time where you had several disks, with a filesystem for each disk. So if you wanted to balance i/o, you create a datafile on each disk. That was 'manual stripping'
But today, you can have very large files with a very high limit, you can backup parts of files in parallel, you balance I/O with virtual filesystems, RAID, ASM, ...
Oracle even has what is called 'bigfile tablespaces' than can have only one datafile that can ahve the maximum size. So there is usually no good reason to have too many datafiles, except if you think it is easier to manage (for example, you have 2 filesystems and want to move some files from one to the other to equilibrate the space).
>> When does one say "I will not resize these datafiles but instead create a new one"?
When it reach the limit that you can manage easily. But if that makes you have 500 datafiles, then you should push up your limit ;)
Regards,
Franck.
