Changing default permenant USERS tablespace to bigfile

I had no problems with a VirtualBox 4.14 Windows 8 preview VM and x64 Oracle 11gR2.

My VM uses 40 GB Hard Disk. While installing it downloaded .Net Framework 3.51 I started with a fresh Windows 8 VM in VirtualBox 4.14 and installed guest additions and run Windows update once. Afterwards I installed Oracle and got the items below on my Start page.

I find the databasefiles of my new database Bk_W8 in C:\app\berndk\oradata\Bk_W8. That is the location I would use for additional tablespaces.

The rest can be done by scripts which can be executed by sqlplus from this machine or from another client and is not Windows 8 specific.

Edit:

By right-clicking on the item on the start page, via advanced | open file location I found the path to the start menu:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Oracle - OraDb11g_home1\Konfigurations- und Migrations-Tools

I guess you will find

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

the other is specific for a German Oracle installation.

To get access to the hidden C:\ProgramData folder see this link showing how to access folder options in Windows 8

Final hint: My VM currently uses 23 GB for the virtual hard disk.

OK I'm going to retry this with the Oracle Database Express Edition 11g Release 2 (September 2011). But that takes some time.

Installation done: The is the Web interface of Oracle 11g XE in Windows 8

For the question of creating addition databaseinstances: from this question on SO we learn, that it is not possible.

Creating tablespaces and users can be done using sqlplus. Which I found at C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\11.2.0\server\bin\sqlplus.exe.

Now going to remove that Virtual machine. I think there are better ways to learn Oracle.

You have a few options.

Create your new bigfile tablespaces, then either:

1) Move the tables one by one with:

alter table mytable move tablespace bigfile_tablespace;

Remember to move indexes too!

alter index myindex rebuild tablespace bigfile_index_tablespace;

2) Export the database with Data Pump, drop the existing objects, then reimport using a remap_tablespace clause, for example:

impdp remap_tablespace=OLDSMALLTS1:NEWBIGTS1,OLDSMALLTS2:NEWBIGTS2 directory=mydir dumpfile=mydumpfile.dmp logfile=mylogfile.log

3) Use DBMS_REDEFINITION to move the objects. An example of this can be found in my answer to another question, here.

Once done, drop all of the old objects and then the tablespaces.

If you can afford the downtime, datapump will be the easiest option.