This is a good tip - thanks. What about if you're using ASM (e.g. for RAC)? Steve On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Tanel Poder <tanel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Yeah, temp tablespace files are created as sparse files. If you use ls -ls > on Unix you'll see the real amount of OS blocks used by the file as the > first column of the output. > > Sparse files cause problems - one thing is that DBAs see from df that > there's lots of free space on a mountpoint - and place new datafiles there. > Now if a sparse file actually starts using its space, it may end up with out > of space and resulting IO errors. > > Also, IIRC, sparse files disable direct IO and cause fallback to buffered IO > in some cases. > > So, a good practice for creating temp files is to use "mkfile" command in OS > first to create the files which really reserve the disk space for themselves > and then "create temp tablespace tempfile 'xyz' REUSE" > > -- > Tanel Poder > http://blog.tanelpoder.com (just switched to new blog template!) -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l