<<Back to DB Administration Main Page What is Oracle Database Block An oracle data block (DB Block) is a logical unit of data storage. And is the smallest unit of IO for oracle database. The data is physically stored in datafiles (disk files) made up of operating system blocks (OS Blocks). The size of OS blocks can be different than the Oracle DB Block. The OS handles IO in OS blocks while oracle always reads, write data in multiple of DB blocks. The size of oracle DB block can be defined using DB_BLOCK_SIZE init parameter (default 8k ) at the time of database creation and can not be changed later. You can configure multiple database block size in a database. To be specific you can define block size for each tablespace (except SYSTEM, SYSAUX). Oracle Data Block Structure Now that you know what is oracle data block, Lets have a look how does it looks like. As you can see in the picture above the oracle DB block got a header (also known as block overhead) on top