Who fills my Data file

Question

Hello all, I have a general Question: How can I find out, who fills up a Data file? I've several identical databases (7.4.3/AIX) in different locations; In one location the TRANSFER.dta grows up very fast. The datafile grows in April up to 2GB - Problems (AIX allows a max size from 2GB), so I altered a second File - TRANSFER_2.dta. But now - 4 month later - the file is grown up to 1,9GB.
In the other locations the files have between 300MB and 800MB. The stuff produce the same, have the same way to work with the database and works with the same Application.
Now I want to know where the reason is. The extents are 17 - not so much i think.
Did you have any Ideas?
Thanks a lot

Answer 1

First of all, people don't fill up datafiles. They insert records into tables which are assigned to tablespaces which write to datafiles. So what you actually need to do is find out which table on the tablespace using these files is growing so fast. A query like this might help...
select s.segment_name, s.segment_type, sum(s.bytes) total_bytes_for_table
from dba_segments s
where s.tablespace_name in ( select f.tablespace_name
                             from dba_data_files f
                             where f.file_name = '&filename')
group by s.segment_name, s.segment_type
order by 3 DESC
/In an ideal world there will a single table or index that will be way bigger than anything else and that's your culprit.
The "why" bit can only be answered then. A likely cause would be some logging activity that is enabled in one database but not the other and which people have forgotten to housekeep.
Cheers, APC