46.6. Automating Storage Management

As of Oracle Database 10g, you can use automatic storage management (ASM) to enhance and simplify your storage management efforts. ASM offers a number of significant advantages, including:

• You can easily add new disks to the set of disks available to the database; Oracle will decide how to best use the disks to distribute the I/O workload.

• The I/O workload will be dynamically distributed among the available disks, without DBA intervention.

• The I/O stripe width can be maintained at different levels for different types of files, all maintained by the database.

• Software mirroring can be enabled if hardware mirroring is not.