Mark, thanks for pointing out excellent reasons for using this. Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 5:54 AM, Mark W. Farnham <mwf@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > This parameter can be very helpful in both very small test systems (where > recovery might well be on the same device as / or C:) and in very large > shops where there is separation of duties between monitoring and > provisioning storage and the dbas actually using storage. In high > availability systems it can be part of the soft limits and headroom > requirements configured so that automatic alerting takes place without ever > reaching it unless the hard limit (actual available acreage in this case) is > reached. The number of things that can go wrong in an operating system > trapping errors and passing them up the chain when an actual hardware limit > is exceeded is much much greater than what can go wrong when a single > program recognizes and honors a soft limit. >