We already talked about creating tablespaces in the other exam topic "OCM 11g Preparation – Create and manage temporary, permanent, and undo tablespaces". For OCM, to have a topic about Big File Tablespace (BST) set aside, is because they want you to fully understand it.
The advantages of BST are more related to the hardware, OS and backup system that you are using. You can have up to 1022 datafiles in a small size tablespace. Each of them can have up to 4 MB blocks size. This give us almost 4 GB blocks per small file tablespace. In a big file tablespace, you can have 1 datafile of 4 GB blocks. So you have no advantage in disk space using BST.
However, it is much more easier for oracle to manage one single datafile than 1022. Less datafiles will improve checkpointing, and database opens faster as this reduce overhead to manage large number of datafiles. Big files are also useful when you place them in an stripped and/or mirrored filesystem.
Path to Documentation:
Oracle Database Administrator's Guide -> Managing Tablespaces
Click here to go back to the Main OCM 11g Preparation page.
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