Managing Your Database: A Roadmap

This section provides an overview of the tasks involved in managing an Oracle database instance. Each task is described in detail in a different chapter in this guide.

To manage your Oracle database:

1. Start the database instance. At the end of the installation, your instance is already started and your database is open. In the future, there will be times, perhaps for doing database maintenance or because of a power or media failure, that you shut down your database instance and later restart it.

   See "Shutting Down and Starting Up the Oracle Instance".

2. Optionally, configure the network environment to enable clients to connect to your database.

   See Chapter 4, "Configuring the Network Environment".

3. Review your database storage structure: tablespaces and datafiles, redo log files, and control files. Create or modify storage structures as needed.

   See Chapter 6, "Managing Database Storage Structures".

4. Review memory allocation and adjust as needed.

   See "Managing Memory".

5. Review, unlock, and reset passwords for predefined database users as needed. Create new users, and assign privileges and roles to them.

   See Chapter 7, "Administering User Accounts and Security".

6. Create any necessary schema objects, including tables, views, and indexes. Populate the tables with data.

   See Chapter 8, "Managing Schema Objects".

7. Create or review the backup strategy for the database and back up the database.

   See Chapter 9, "Performing Backup and Recovery".

8. Enable archiving of redo logs, if not already done.

   See "Configuring Recovery Settings".

9. Monitor database performance, diagnose performance problems, and tune the database as necessary.

   See Chapter 10, "Monitoring and Tuning the Database".

10. Investigate, gather diagnostic data for, and report to Oracle Support Services any critical database errors.

    See Chapter 11, "Investigating, Reporting, and Resolving Problems".

11. Keep Oracle Database software up-to-date with the latest patch releases.

    See Chapter 12, "Managing Oracle Database Software".