One of the strengths of the Oracle RDBMS is its tremendous level of configurability. While some other RDBMS products take a fairly "black box" approach to their software that doesn't allow the DBA a great deal of control, Oracle allows the DBA to configure nearly every practical aspect of administration. However, even though Oracle allows a DBA to control many aspects of the database, we also have the option of releasing that control in order to ease the burden of certain administrative functions. We close this chapter by looking at Oracle Managed Files (OMF), one of the automation features of the Oracle RDBMS. With OMF, we can allow Oracle to control both the naming and sizing of datafiles that are created within the database. This can greatly simplify the process of creating tablespaces. Because, in our case, we want to maintain this control, we will simply step through the process here, rather than actually implementing OMF in our database.
Setting up OMF is...