A storage area is a set of physical disk files, and it is the largest physical unit of a database. With storage areas, you have physical control over the location of database objects: you can place each database object in its own storage area, you can place many database objects in a single storage area, or you can place objects of different types in the same storage area. Even though you can extend a table or index across multiple extents, you cannot split them across storage areas.
Certain storage areas have restrictions on the types of extents they support. See the
Extents for a definition of extents. The transaction log storage area, used for two-phase commit, uses only fixed-length extents but it can use more than one. The other storage areas can use many extents but they can have only one variable-length extent, which must be the last extent.
Storage areas are identified by their names. The number and types of storage areas used varies from database to database. However, all OpenEdge databases must contain a control area, a schema area, and a primary recovery area.
