It’s back in the days before Google, when this IT shop is running an Oracle database on a Digital Equipment Corp. VAX minicomputer under VMS — and running into a problem, says a pilot fish on the scene.

“One day, we got a max-extent error on one of our tablespaces — we were using more extents than we were supposed to,” fish says. “Since we had plenty of disk space, we just increased the number of allowed extents.

“A bit of time passed, and we got that same error. OK, the table grew. So we decided to set max-extents to the highest allowable value. According to the documentation, that was 999.

“A bit more time passed — and we got the same error again. Our tables couldn’t have grown that long that quickly. Oracle support was no help, so we just recreated the tablespace with an initial size larger than the current file and with larger extents.

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