A DEVSPACE is a Windows NT file which contains the whole data or at least part of the data of a SERVERDB.
DEVSPACEs of a SERVERDB should not be created on the same physical disk.
A DEVSPACE is created as a file in the currently used Windows NT file system. This can be a FAT file system or an NTFS file system, according to the file system that was created on the corresponding drive (see the Windows NT documentation). The DEVSPACE name must comply with the corresponding filename conventions.
Under Windows NT, the configured DEVSPACEs are automatically created and expanded to the specified size when the SERVERDB is initialized. As soon as DEVSPACEs have been created, their sizes remain unchanged.
Windows NT files can also be configured as DEVSPACEs by using NFS. When doing so, data consistency, recovery, and performance problems may occur because NFS buffers the data, so that there is no guarantee that the data pages are immediately written to hard disk. As error correction is very difficult, if not impossible, in such a case, DEVSPACEs via NFS files must only be used for testing purposes.
For further information about DEVSPACEs, see the CONTROL manual, Section 2.