Why You Can’t Create a Tablespace in Oracle Autonomous Database (ORA-01031 Error)

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While working with Oracle Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud, I hit a roadblock trying to do something that seemed pretty basic: creating a tablespace. This is something I’ve done before in AWS RDS for Oracle without any issues, so I assumed it would work the same way here.

Well… it didn’t. 😅

🤔 What I Tried

SQL
CREATE TABLESPACE my_tablespace DATAFILE 'myfile.dbf' SIZE 100M;

This familiar SQL command threw the following error:

ORA-01031: insufficient privileges

At first, I thought it was a permission issue — maybe my user account didn’t have the right privileges. I double-checked roles, tried different accounts… no luck.

🔍 The Real Reason

Turns out, Autonomous Database doesn’t allow manual tablespace management. The platform is designed to be fully managed, meaning Oracle handles storage, optimization, and other configurations behind the scenes.

From the official Oracle docs:

Autonomous Database automatically configures default data and temporary tablespaces for the database. Adding, removing, or modifying tablespaces is not allowed.

So commands like the following are not supported in Autonomous Database:

  • CREATE TABLESPACE
  • ALTER TABLESPACE
  • DROP TABLESPACE

📌 Source: Oracle Autonomous SQL Command Restrictions

😬 Why I Got Confused

Coming from AWS RDS for Oracle — where you can create and manage tablespaces — I assumed the same would be true here. But the two services take very different approaches:

  • RDS for Oracle: Gives you more DBA-like control
  • Autonomous Database: Handles most DBA tasks automatically

✅ Takeaway

If you’re using Oracle Autonomous Database, it’s important to shift your mindset: you don’t need to (and can’t) manage everything manually. Oracle takes care of it for you. Before running SQL commands that involve system-level configuration, always check the documentation — some features might be restricted.

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