should one use disk quotas?

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi all,

on the servers I have to look after there are Oracle/SAP DBMSs running.
A few of them are expected to increase soon as new customers are participating with their data.
At the moment I have a script running that looks after the systems' health regularly (or after what I consider to be healthy).
Part of this check is some kind of bdf invocation to raise alert mails when filesystems reach a certain threshold.
I have to admit this is utterly crude and thus thought about imposing disk quotas.
I have to add that there are (apart from us sysadmins and dbas) no human users on the system since luckily the user administration is taken care of by the SAP system, so that there is no need to keep Unix accounts for them.
Because I have very little experience with databases (and HP-UX administration in general) I am not sure if you can set a quota on the filesystems/tablespace of a running DBMS, or is this (even when shutting down the db temporarily) an absolute no no?
I don't even know the commands on HP-UX to set up quotas yet.
If doing this is there special concern to be given with respect to SG clusters (we have a few of those here)?

TIA for your thoughts
Ralph

[Lasse Knudsen]

I would most definetely *not* use quotas on a filesystem containing DB-files.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

I dont use quota where datafiles are, well what I do is to not use all the space available when I extend by adding new disks, I even keep some disks unused.
I only use quota where users (mostly developpers) tend to spread themselves like home directories...