Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

Creating a Database

As we discussed in Chapter 2, an Oracle installation can have many different databases. You should take a two-step approach for any new databases you create. First, understand the purpose of the database, and then create the database with the appropriate parameters.

Planning the Database

As with installing the Oracle software, you should spend some time learning the purpose of an Oracle database before you create the database itself. Consider what the database will be used for and how much data it will contain. You should understand the underlying hardware that you’ll use—the number and type of CPUs, the amount of memory, the number of disks, the controllers for the disks, and so on. Because the database is stored on the disks, many tuning problems can be avoided with proper capacity and I/O subsystem planning.

Planning your database and the supporting hardware requires insights into the scale or size of the workload and the type of work the system will perform. Some of the considerations that will affect your database design and hardware configuration include the following:

How many users will the database have?

How many users will connect simultaneously and how many will concurrently perform transactions or execute queries?

Is the database supporting OLTP applications or data warehousing?

This distinction leads to different types and volumes of activity on the database server. For example, online transaction processing (OLTP) systems usually have a larger number ...