FreeLists / oracle-l / Re: Multiple data files per tablespace--benefit?

[Joseph Amalraj <joseph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The only one benefit I heard, that restores are faster for when the datafile 
size is smaller.

"Murching, Bob" <bob_murching@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:      Traditionally I've used 
multiple data files for large tablespaces.  Manageability benefits aside, when 
using traditional filesystems, performance on all sorts of operations 
(typically parallelized) has been much better if I had separate data files on 
separate disk devices.
  Yesterday I did some benchmarking using ASM instead of a filesystem, and 
letting ASM stripe across disk groups.  I saw no advantage whatsoever in having 
multiple datafiles.  In fact, for parallel bulk operations (nologging bulk 
inserts, full scans, etc.) performance degraded quite a bit.
  Just wanted to confirm, before making any wholesale changes, that from a 
performance perspective it is reasonable to have single, large data files in an 
ASM world?
  Bob