Paul,

> This has the major disadvantage of, for example, not allowing
> the DBA to put infrequently updated tables on one of the
> 3 other disks to really optimise disk usage for "hot"
> tables.

There are a number of hardware solutions which have made the need for such "hot" management a thing of the past.

Those solutions are:

- PCIe SSDs (97000 Read and 32000 Write random 4 KB IO/s)!!!

- SATA SSDs (35000 Read and 3300 Write random 4 KB IO/s)!

- Battery backup cached disk controllers (some with 4GB of write cache)

- disk controllers with up to 128GB of SSD based Read cache

- increases in RAM supported in servers to 256GB


I would argue that "hot" management is another feature which Oracle/MS DBAs use to justify their jobs.


Sean