Preface

This guide is for people who administer the operation of an Oracle Database system. Referred to as database administrators (DBAs), they are responsible for creating Oracle Database, ensuring its smooth operation, and monitoring its use.

This preface contains these topics:

• Audience

• Organization

• Related Documentation

• Conventions

• Documentation Accessibility

  
  

  Note: The Oracle Database Administrator's Guide contains information that describes the features and functionality of the Oracle Database Standard Edition, Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and Oracle Database Personal Edition products. These products have the same basic features. However, several advanced features are available only with the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Personal Edition, and some of these are optional. For example, to create partitioned tables and indexes, you must have the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Personal Edition. For information about the differences between the various editions of Oracle Database and the features and options that are available to you, please refer to Oracle Database New Features.

  
  

Audience

Readers of this guide are assumed to be familiar with relational database concepts. They are also assumed to be familiar with the operating system environment under which they are running Oracle Database.

Administrators frequently participate in installing the Oracle Database server software and upgrading an existing Oracle Database to newer formats (for example, Oracle9i database to Oracle Database 10g format). This guide is not an installation or upgrade manual.

If your primary interest is installation, see your operating system specific Oracle installation guide.

If your primary interest is upgrading a database or application, see the Oracle Database Upgrade Guide.

In addition to administrators, experienced users of Oracle Database and advanced database application designers might also find information in this guide useful.

However, database application developers should also see the Oracle Database Application Developer's Guide - Fundamentals and the documentation for the tool or language product they are using to develop Oracle Database applications.

Organization

This document contains:

This chapter serves as a general introduction to typical tasks performed by database administrators, such as installing software and planning a database.

This chapter discusses considerations for creating a database and takes you through the steps of creating one. Consult this chapter when in the database planning and creation stage.

Consult this chapter when you wish to start up a database, alter its availability, or shut it down. Parameter files related to starting up and shutting down are also described here.

This chapter helps you to identify different Oracle Database processes, such as dedicated server processes and shared server processes. Consult this chapter when configuring, modifying, tracking and managing processes.

This chapter describes all aspects of managing control files: naming, creating, troubleshooting, and dropping control files.

This chapter describes all aspects of managing the online redo log: planning, creating, renaming, dropping, or clearing redo log files.

Consult this chapter for information about archive modes and tuning archiving.

This chapter provides guidelines to follow as you manage tablespaces, and describes how to create, manage, alter, drop and move data between tablespaces.

This chapter provides guidelines to follow as you manage datafiles, and describes how to create, change, alter, rename and view information about datafiles.

Consult this chapter to learn how to manage undo space using an undo tablespace.

This chapter describes how you can direct the Oracle Database server to create and manage your database files

This chapter briefly discusses some of the concepts behind Automatic Storage Management and describes how to use it.

Consult this chapter for descriptions of common tasks, such as setting storage parameters, deallocating space and managing space.

Consult this chapter for general table management guidelines, as well as information about creating, altering, maintaining and dropping tables.

Consult this chapter for general guidelines about indexes, including creating, altering, monitoring and dropping indexes.

Consult this chapter to learn about partitioned tables and indexes and how to create and manage them.

Consult this chapter for general guidelines to follow when creating, altering, or dropping clusters.

Consult this chapter for general guidelines to follow when creating, altering, or dropping hash clusters.

This chapter describes all aspects of managing views, sequences and synonyms.

This chapter covers more varied aspects of schema management. The operations described in this chapter are not unique to any one type of schema objects. Consult this chapter for information about analyzing objects, truncation of tables and clusters, database triggers, integrity constraints, and object dependencies.

This chapter describes methods for detecting and repairing data block corruption.

This chapter discusses the importance of establishing a security policy for your database and users.

This chapter describes how to take advantage of automatic system tasks.

This chapter describes how to use the Database Resource Manager to allocate resources.

This chapter describes how to take statements created with DBMS_JOB and rewrite them using DBMS_SCHEDULER

Oracle Database provides advanced scheduling capabilities through the database Scheduler. This chapter introduces you to its concepts.

This chapter describes how to use the Scheduler.

This chapter covers the tasks a database administrator needs to perform so end users can schedule jobs using the Scheduler.

This chapter describes the basic concepts and terminology of Oracle Database distributed database architecture.

This chapter describes how to manage and maintain a distributed database system.

This chapter describes considerations important when developing an application to run in a distributed database system.

This chapter describes what distributed transactions are and how Oracle Database maintains their integrity.

This chapter describes how to manage and troubleshoot distributed transactions.

Related Documentation

For more information, see these Oracle resources:

• Oracle Database Concepts

  This book is a starting point to become familiar with the concepts and terminology of the Oracle Database server, and is recommended reading before attempting the tasks described in the Oracle Database Administrator's Guide.

• Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Basics

  This book provides an overview of backup and recovery and discusses backup and recovery strategies. It provides instructions for basic backup and recovery of your database using Recovery Manager (RMAN).

• Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Advanced User's Guide

  This guide covers more advanced database backup and recovery topics, including performing user-managed backup and recovery for users who choose not to use RMAN.

• Oracle Database Performance Tuning Guide

  This book exposes important considerations in setting up a database system and can help you understand tuning your database. It is mainly conceptual, defining terms, architecture, and design principles, and then outlines proactive and reactive tuning methods.

• Oracle Database Performance Tuning Guide

  This book can be used as a reference guide for tuning your Oracle Database system.

• Oracle Database Application Developer's Guide - Fundamentals

  Many of the tasks done by DBAs are shared by application developers. In some cases, descriptions of tasks seemed better located in an application level book, and in those cases, this fundamentals book is the primary reference.

Many of the examples in this book use the sample schemas of the seed database, which is installed by default when you install Oracle Database. Refer to Oracle Database Sample Schemas for information on how these schemas were created and how you can use them yourself.

Printed documentation is available for sale in the Oracle Store at

http://oraclestore.oracle.com/

To download free release notes, installation documentation, white papers, or other collateral, please visit the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). You must register online before using OTN; registration is free and can be done at

http://otn.oracle.com/membership/

If you already have a username and password for OTN, then you can go directly to the documentation section of the OTN Web site at

http://otn.oracle.com/documentation

Conventions

This section describes the conventions used in the text and code examples of this documentation set. It describes:

• Conventions in Text

• Conventions in Code Examples

• Conventions for Windows Operating Systems

We use various conventions in text to help you more quickly identify special terms. The following table describes those conventions and provides examples of their use.

Code examples illustrate SQL, PL/SQL, SQL*Plus, or other command-line statements. They are displayed in a monospace (fixed-width) font and separated from normal text as shown in this example:

SELECT username FROM dba_users WHERE username = 'MIGRATE';

The following table describes typographic conventions used in code examples and provides examples of their use.

[ ]

DECIMAL (digits [ , precision ])

{ }

{ENABLE | DISABLE}

|

{ENABLE | DISABLE}
[COMPRESS | NOCOMPRESS]

...

CREATE TABLE ... AS subquery;

SELECT col1, col2, ... , coln FROM employees;

.
 .
 .

SQL> SELECT NAME FROM V$DATAFILE;
NAME
------------------------------------
/fsl/dbs/tbs_01.dbf
/fs1/dbs/tbs_02.dbf
.
.
.
/fsl/dbs/tbs_09.dbf
9 rows selected.

acctbal NUMBER(11,2);
acct    CONSTANT NUMBER(4) := 3;

Italics 

CONNECT SYSTEM/system_password
DB_NAME = database_name

UPPERCASE

SELECT last_name, employee_id FROM employees;
SELECT * FROM USER_TABLES;
DROP TABLE hr.employees;

lowercase

SELECT last_name, employee_id FROM employees;
sqlplus hr/hr
CREATE USER mjones IDENTIFIED BY ty3MU9;

The following table describes conventions for Windows operating systems and provides examples of their use.

c:\winnt"\"system32 is the same as C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32

C:\oracle\oradata>

C:\>exp scott/tiger TABLES=emp QUERY=\"WHERE job='SALESMAN' and sal<1600\"
C:\>imp SYSTEM/password FROMUSER=scott TABLES=(emp, dept)

HOME_NAME 

C:\> net start OracleHOME_NAMETNSListener

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible, with good usability, to the disabled community. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For additional information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at

http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/

JAWS, a Windows screen reader, may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, JAWS may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.