What are the benefits of moving redologs, data- and controlfiles to another location?

Question

I have installed Oracle 18c XE and was wondering what benefits/disadvantages would come from seperating the data that is stored inside the databases managed by the dbms and the actual Oracle installation (Oracle_Home).

I ask this because it is possible to move Redologs, Datafiles and Controlfiles. I just don't have an idea why anybody would do that.

Answer 1

Seperate locations may have different performance characteristics or high availability or other properties.

For example you may use slower and cheaper storage for data that is rarely accessed, or a location with lower redundancy settings for temporary files.

To be honest, we rarely ever bother with this.

In a clustered environment, the data is stored in a shared location, but the Oracle database software is typically stored on some local storage location.

Answer 2

Besides Balasz excellent answer about performance, there is also the availability aspect: making it so that data files, control files and redo logs (as well as archive logs and backups) are stored on different physical media. This to make it so that the probability of losing everything is less.

But as pointed out, on modern storage systems, striped and mirrored, this is much less of a concern. Even less when your database lives in the cloud, and not at all if is an Autonomous DB.