Oracle Automatic Storage Management Technical Overview

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a new feature of Oracle Database 10g which provides a vertical integration of the file system and volume manager specifically built for the Oracle database files. ASM distributes I/O load across all available resource to optimize performance while removing the need for Manual I/O tuning (spreading out the database files avoids hot spots . ASM helps DBAs manage a dynamic database environment by allowing them to grow the database size without having to shut down the database to adjust the storage allocation.