Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

Management Through the Oracle Enterprise Manager

Each new set of Oracle features requires corresponding management capabilities. For instance, the addition of database partitions to Oracle not only provides more capabilities, but requires additional management functions to ride herd on these capabilities. This ever-increasing feature curve can require a fairly steep learning curve on the part of the novice. To ease this learning curve, Oracle has recently provided more intuitive management of these features through the Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM).

The EM provides both a standard graphical interface across multiple platforms and a framework that can support a variety of monitoring tools. The growth of combined Windows NT/2000 and Unix deployment of Oracle, in particular, has resulted in many DBAs using the single EM interface to access Oracle instances residing on multiple operating systems. Today, you can deploy the EM standard console to a browser-based client, further adding to its flexibility.

The EM framework provides a standard user interface and includes standard components for performing many basic database administration tasks, including:

• Security management—creating and changing users, roles, privileges, user profiles, and passwords

• Schema management for examining tables, indexes, and views

• Instance management—starting up or shutting down database instances, managing database initialization parameters, saving configurations, resolving in-doubt transactions, and managing ...