Chapter 3: What Is an Oracle Database?

Chapter 3: What Is an Oracle Database?

Overview

This chapter describes the parts that make up an Oracle database. We will learn about components such as the control files, datafiles, tablespaces and redo logs.

Oracle Database Physical Overview

An Oracle database comprises a number of physical files, as illustrated in Figure 3.1 which will be one of four different types:


	?	Control files;


	?	Datafiles;


	?	Redo Log files;


	?	Parameter.

Figure 3.1: Physical Components of an Oracle8 Database

All of these files can be located on different disks on your system; in fact, it is recommended that they are not all located on the same disk, if at all possible. Of course, if you are building a small test database then this is not so important, but for a production system it is wise to try and minimize the number of files to recover in the unlikely event of a disk failure. Some of the files such as the control and redo logs, can have multiple copies which are automatically kept up to date by the database server. For a production system, it is wise to take advantage of this feature.

When the physical files are created they can have a file extension of whatever you like; however, it is probably a good idea to name them all .ORA so that you know they belong to the database server.

Control Files

When we created our database in the previous chapter , in the initialization...

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Chapter 3: What Is an Oracle Database?

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