Re: Database creation

This question is asked by a lot of people. I recently had a developer show me how great SQL*Anywhere was because all the database was in one file (1 MB). He could not understand why Oracle was a little more complicated?

The short answer is because it has to be. Oracle runs small on line transaction processing (OLTP in the MB size ) to very large data warehouses (GBs, maybe bigger). Oracle must be extremely concerned with issues such as security, reliability, recoverability, data access speeds. 1000s of users hitting trillions of pieces of data 7 days week, 24 hours a day 365 days a year is a difficult thing to create, especially if you want it to be in one file (yet to see an OS that can create a terabyte sized file). Oracle is all thing to all DBAs, there are smaller version such as Oracle Lite and Personal Oracle for small Access sized databases, and complicated configuration such as parallel server that share a database across many instances, maybe continents apart. (don't go there until you got the basics covered).

Anyway, when you INSTANTLY get your bank book updated at a ATM, and 10,000 other people do the exact same thing at the exact same time, and they get there book INSTANTLY updated as well, rest assured it was not a single file database that pulled that off.

fwit, I'd first look at the Oracle concepts manual to get a feel for the db before looking into the admin guide. You can get them free at http://technet.oracle.com/

Have fun and keep an open mind until you are required to do something BIG, then you'll appreciate the complexity of Oracle (not to mention pays good too)

Mike

Olivier Davant <davant_at_homsys.com> wrote in message news:37AF0AD8.4F2C1059_at_homsys.com...
> Oracle Database structure is a little bit strange for me, especially the
> database structure based on (if I have correctly understand !) multiples
> files and one instance.
> Why can't the database be located in only one file ?
>
> If I get a file *.odb from somewhere else (it's the one which contain
> tha data I think), how can I build an instance associated with this file
> ?
>
> Do I have to build another database and import the data from this file ?
> If yes, what is the procedure (I've read something about a control file
> to load data, but nothing else...)
>
>
> Thanks a lot for any explanations...
Received on Mon Aug 09 1999 - 21:54:30 CDT