>>>The "largest number of Oracle blocks per file" limit still >>>applies. That's around 30GB with 8K block sizes. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ might as well be precise. It is (2^21) - 1 Oracle blocks per datafile which with an 8KB block is 8K short of 16GB. A 10g BIGFILE tablespace supports 2^32 blocks which is 32TB for a single file tablespace...they are limited to 1 file per tablespace. The whole topic is noise really, modern Oses handle axtremely large numbers of file descriptors without issue... so choose what makes sense... our QA tests here include OLTP stress tests with databases that consist of 16383 datafiles "evenly" distributed throughout 512 filesystems...just for bounds testing... -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l