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I think expecting end-users to know or care about the implementation detail of a memory-mapped file is even sillier than all the other silly expectations floating around this thread.

You are right I would not expect end-users to know this. I would expect someone who writes articles about DBMS to know this though.

What do you expect end-users to know about oracle or any kind of database tuning?

Maybe stupid question, but isn't there mmap64 and mmap2 with which you can map larger files? You are limited to 2 gigs at a time, but that shouldn't be a complete show stopper.

How could it be larger? You could use mmap64.