Some beginner DBA questions (quota, pfile, insert, password)

Hi,

I am a 3-weeks old DBA, and already have a few questions to this group... ;-). We are running Oracle 7.2 on SunOS 5.4.1.

1. What is the importance of $ORACLE_HOME/pfile directory and why do my init.ora files have to be there, instead of $ORACLE_HOME/dbs? Does it matter?
2. I have created several cron jobs that do things for me, like doing nightly exports of the database. However, they require logging in as 'system' and I don't want to supply the password on the command-line for obvious reasons (like 'ps -af'). So I created a hidden file with no access to anyone, and my cron script has something like:

exp PARFILE=export_parameters.txt < "my hidden file with password"

How secure is it, and is there a better way?

3. Some users do INSERTs with huge number of records, and it is all temp data that they don't really care about. However, it generates lots of redo logs. Is there a way to run an INSERT that does not generate redo logs, maybe similar to using TRUNCATE (no redo logs) instead of DELETE (lots of redo logs)?

4. Some users have created junk in tablespaces they were not supposed to. SO I set their default tablespace to TEMP. I would also like to restrict them in SYSTEM tablespace, maybe by setting a quota. How? Would it work? Any other suggestions?

5. Somebody here mentioned a DBA FAQ. Where can I get one?

And that's it for now. I appreciate every comment or suggestion you might have for me. Additionally, could you please also email me the reply, since due to our firewall I don't have access to newsgroups from work. And often at home I am too busy reading Oracle docs... ;-)

Thanks,

-- 
[ Simon Goland                 sg_at_mda.ca ]
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