Oracle in a Nutshell

Chapter 2. Configuration

Oracle is designed to be a very flexible and configurable system. These qualities are absolute necessities for a database that can be run on dozens of different hardware platforms in a multitude of configurations, supporting an almost infinite variety of applications and users. In order to achieve the needed flexibility, Oracle must provide the DBA with a simple method of specifying certain operational characteristics of the database in a clear and consistent manner. DBAs specify most of these characteristics by setting and resetting values for the database initialization parameters , commonly referred to as INIT.ORA parameters . The fundamental goal is to set or reset these parameters in a way that gets the database running at its peak performance level.

Each initialization parameter controls a specific aspect of the Oracle server. Together, all of the parameters combine to shape the generic Oracle database technology to fit your particular needs.

The following is a typical initialization file for a general-purpose installation of Oracle9i:

DB_NAME = "ORA9" DB_DOMAIN = homeserver INSTANCE_NAME = ORA9 SERVICE_NAMES = ORA9.homeserver DB_FILES = 1024 DB_BLOCK_SIZE = 8192 COMPATIBLE = 9.0.0 SORT_AREA_SIZE = 65536 SORT_AREA_RETAINED_SIZE = 65536 CONTROL_FILES = ("C:\Oracle\oradata\ORA9\control01.ctl", "D:\Oracle\oradata\ORA9\control02.ctl", "E:\Oracle\oradata\ORA9\control03.ctl") OPEN_CURSORS = 100 CURSOR_SHARING = similar MAX_ENABLED_ROLES = 30 DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT ...