RE: I admit this is dumb. NT/W2K Services?

From: Koivu, Lisa <lisa.koivu_at_efairfield.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 07:12:14 -0700
Message-ID: <F001.0036B328.20010815070135@fatcity.com>

DING! (That's the light bulb going on in my head)

That makes complete sense. Thanks Guy for outlining this in email. I understand now.

It took me ~4 hours to create my very first ORA-600 on my w2k oracle database and crash it. :) That has GOT to be a record!

-----Original Message-----

From:   Guy Hammond [SMTP:guy.hammond_at_avt.co.uk]
Sent:   Wednesday, August 15, 2001 6:46 AM
To:     Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Subject: RE: I admit this is dumb. NT/W2K Services?

Hi Lisa,

Yes, I agree it can be confusing. The service is a background process that provides an environment for Oracle to execute in - I don't know about the specifics in this case, but Oracle on Unix is comprised of two logical parts, the VOS and Oracle itself. You don't see this because its all started from a single binary. Oracle's own engineering is split into two groups, VOS, or "virtual operating system" who maintain a version of VOS for each operating system Oracle supports, and the Oracle database itself, which uses the VOS API rather than the underlying Unix (or whatever) APIs. So, things that are the same on all Oracle platforms, like say the SQL parser, are actually the same code, making calls to VOS, and VOS is different on every platform.

So if Oracle want to support a new OS, they simply develop a version of VOS for it, then use it to recompile the main codebase - and the people working on their core products never need to worry about operating systems and can concentrate on "pure" algorithms and functionality.

I assume that the service (for example, OracleServiceTEST on my workstation) is VOS for NT. When you start the service, set ORACLE_SID then connect / as sysdba and type "startup", I guess what you are doing is invoking the platform-independent parts of Oracle's code, compiled for VOS on Intel.

Cheers,

g

-----Original Message-----
From: Koivu, Lisa [mailto:lisa.koivu_at_efairfield.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2001 6:22 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: I admit this is dumb. NT/W2K Services?

I'm playing with Oracle on w2k out of sheer boredom. So now I'm forced to learn a little bit about w2k.

I was looking at oradim and it has starttype and shuttype with options srvc and inst. OK, I understand the instance part. But what on earth are services? Below is what the help says about it. So to translate this into Unix-speak, is this similar to a daemon? I guess I'm confused because as far as I know there's nothing additional that needs to be running on Unix to just start up a database.

If that's the case, then why would you want to shut down an instance and not services? For RMAN? I guess I'm at a loss here. Can someone give me an example of when you'd want to do this?

Plus, there's notes on Metalink about recreating services. Why/when would you want to do that?

Here's the overly-generic definition I found. A program, routine, or process that performs a specific system function to support other programs, particularly at a low (close to the hardware) level. When services are provided over a network, they can be published in Active Directory, facilitating service-centric administration and usage. Some examples of Windows 2000 services are Security Accounts Manager service, File Replication Service, and Routing and Remote Access Service.

Any descriptions or web sites that can describe this would be appreciated.

Lisa Koivu
Oracle Database Administrator and Self-Professed W2K Idiot. Fairfield Resorts, Inc.
954-935-4117 Received on Wed Aug 15 2001 - 09:12:14 CDT