In addition to what 's been said already by others:

Having number of smaller datafiles compare to one huge datafile has
also the following advantages:
- if your backup/restore fails in the middle - you don't have to
restart it from scratch
- you can parallelize backup/restore
- if one datafile got corrupted - the rest of the database is still
available while only one "small" datafile is restored/recovered

On 7/6/07, genegurevich@(protected):
> Hi all:
>
> I am building a database which will grow to 2.5 or 3 Tb. I am wondering
> what is a realistic file size I should be using.


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Alex Gorbachev, Oracle DBA Brewer, The Pythian Group
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