Whether you’re an experienced DBA, a new DBA, or an application developer, you need to understand how Oracle11g’s new features can help you best meet your customers’ needs. In this book, you will find coverage of the newest features as well as ways of merging those features into the management of an Oracle database. The emphasis throughout is on managing the database’s capabilities in an effective and efficient manner to deliver a quality product. The end result will be a database that is dependable, robust, secure, and extensible.

Several components are critical to this goal, and all of them are covered in depth after we introduce the Oracle Architecture, Oracle 11g upgrade issues, and tablespace planning in Part I. A well-designed logical and physical database architecture will improve performance and ease administration by properly distributing database objects. You’ll see appropriate monitoring, security, and tuning strategies for stand-alone and networked databases in Part II of this book. Backup and recovery strategies are provided to help ensure the database’s recoverability. Each section focuses on both the features and the proper planning and management techniques for each area. High availability is covered in all of its flavors: Real Application Clusters (RAC), Recovery Manager (RMAN), and Oracle Data Guard, to name a few of the topics covered in-depth in Part III of this book.

Networking issues and the management of distributed and client/server databases are thoroughly covered. Oracle Net, networking configurations, materialized views, location transparency, and everything else you need to successfully implement a distributed or client/server database are described in detail in Part IV of this book. You’ll also find real-world examples for every major configuration. In addition to the commands needed to perform DBA activities, you will also see the Oracle Enterprise Manager web pages from which you can perform similar functions. By following the techniques in this book, your systems can be designed and implemented so well that tuning efforts will be minimal. Administering the database will become easier as the users get a better product, while the database works—and works well.