Introduction to Quick Wins

In Part II, "Quick Wins Using Oracle Database 10g," you will learn about Automatic Memory Management, Automatic Statistics Collection, Automatic Undo Management, Automatic Segment Management, and Automatic Backup Management. All these features could be collectively highlighted as some of the important feature improvements of Oracle Database 10g over previous versions. These features in Oracle Database 10g are ready to be turned on and used at no extra cost and with no major effort. When used, these features can help you quickly reap benefits in various areas of database administration. After you learn to use these features with the help of Chapters 59 in this book, you will be able to implement and benefit from these "quick wins with Oracle Database 10g." Let's start the second phase of our expedition with automatic memory management.

In previous database releases, the database administrator (DBA) sized different SGA components manually through initialization parameters like SHARED_POOL_SIZE, DB_CACHE_SIZE, JAVA_POOL_SIZE, and LARGE_POOL_SIZE. Oracle Database 10g has introduced the Automatic Shared Memory Management feature to simplify the SGA memory management burdens of the DBA. The DBA can specify the total amount of SGA memory available to an instance with the SGA_TARGET parameter. The Oracle Database 10g will automatically allocate the memory among its components, enabling the most effective memory utilization. Let us dive into the details.