With judicious use of transaction suspension and resumable timeout periods, one can generally avoid such incidents. Even without this capability, given the choice of having a transaction fail because of an out-of-space condition (a) in a tablespace consisting of non-AUTOEXTEND datafile(s), or (b) in the filesystem in which such files live, I'd choose the former every time, since in general it's easier to recover from the first than the second. ===================================== Jim Silverman Senior Systems Database Administrator Solucient, LLC - A Thomson Company Telephone: 734-669-7641 FAX: 734-930-7611 E-Mail: jim.silverman@xxxxxxxxxxx -----Original Message----- From: Ted Coyle [mailto:oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 3:55 PM To: Silverman, James (TH USA); godwin.ror@xxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: dropping Undo Tablespace So you'd rather have a business transaction/batch process fail? Unfortunately, I can't answer your question. However, the situation you describe perfectly illustrates my loathing for using AUTOEXTEND ... Ted No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.8.4/825 - Release Date: 5/30/2007 3:03 PM -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l