Book Image

OCA Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration I: A Real-World Certification Guide

Book Image

OCA Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration I: A Real-World Certification Guide

Overview of this book

Oracle Database Server is the most widely used relational database in the world today. This book gives you the essential skills to master the fundamentals of Oracle database administration and prepares you for Oracle DBA certification."OCA Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration I: A Real-World Certification Guide" prepares you to master the fundamentals of Oracle database administration using an example driven method that is easy to understand. The real world examples will prepare you to face the daily challenges of being a database administrator.Starting with the essentials of why databases are important in today's information technology world and how they work, you are then guided through a full, customized installation of the Oracle software and creating your own personal database. We then examine fundamental concepts of Oracle, including architecture, storage structures, security, performance tuning, networking, and instance management. Finally, we take an in-depth look at some of the most important concepts in the daily life of an Oracle DBA - backup, recovery, and data migration."OCA Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration I: A Real-World Certification Guide" provides you with the skills you need in order to become a successful Oracle DBA, both for certification and real life tasks.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
OCA Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration I: A Real-World Certification Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.packtpub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the data dictionary


We've mentioned the concept of the data dictionary several times thus far. The data dictionary is the metadata repository that holds all of the information about the database and its internal operations. It consists of base tables and views to those tables and is stored in the SYSTEM tablespace. As DBAs, the data dictionary is perhaps the most important tool at our disposal, other than our own problem-solving abilities. It is possible to complete many of our DBA tasks using GUI tools and completely ignore the data dictionary. Doing so, however, is inadvisable. While tools have limitations based on their programming, the data dictionary is a complex, but nearly unlimited, source of information about the database.

Exploring the Oracle base tables

In order to understand the data dictionary, it is important to understand that our interaction with it comes primarily in the form of data dictionary views. In SQL, we can create views on tables to simplify our queries...