Best practices for creating application schema

Question

All,
Can anyone recommend best practices (or pointer to a url) for creating application schema. A novice installer created a schema and the tablespace ran out of disk space in 2 days and the system came to a halt at a production site. The tablespace was created with one datafile and with MAXSIZE specified. I am looking for Do's and Dont's on production system.
Thanks for any help,
Vissu

Answer 1

I'm not sure that you can boil this down to a "Do's and Don'ts" list unless you want to get overly general...
For example, do make sure that you provision space appropriately. "Appropriately" however, is going to be radically different in different environments. Some shops set all their data files to autoextend in production and monitor utilization at the OS level. Other shops specify exact file sizes and monitor utilization at the Oracle level. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages, you just need to make sure that your application uses the same approach that every other application in the organization uses.
Do have an idea about the space utilization of the application, but don't go overboard. Running out of space in 2 days means someone failed to do a basic analysis. On the other hand, I've seen people spend way more time than they should making 5 year projections based on some relatively soft assumptions and getting worried about internal overheads that were much smaller than the error bars in their baseline estimates. Of course, the precision necessary also depends on the implications-- a 20% error in a multi-TB data warehouse is going to have a lot more impact than a 20% error in a 20 GB OLTP application.
Justin