Now that we have both the software and a database in place, we can begin to really explore what Oracle has to offer. This chapter covers the Oracle architecture and how it operates to provide data integrity and high performance in an Oracle system. We can think of this chapter as Oracle "behind the curtain." We will examine the part of the Oracle database that users and developers don't see. There are a great deal of terms in this chapter, but many of them will not be completely unfamiliar. We will find that many of them were introduced in the previous chapter.
In this chapter we will:
Understand the distinction between a database and an instance
Explore the Oracle instance
Understand Oracle's process architecture
Examine the Oracle memory cache architecture
Explore the Oracle database
Investigate Oracle's datafile structure