Chapter 2. Architecture Overview

Oracle is designed to be a very portable database—it is available on every platform of relevance, from Windows to UNIX to mainframes. However, the physical architecture of Oracle looks different on different operating systems. For example, on a UNIX operating system, you'll see Oracle implemented as many different operating system processes, virtually a process per major function. On UNIX, this is the correct implementation, as it works on a multiprocess foundation. On Windows, however, this architecture would be inappropriate and would not work very well (it would be slow and nonscalable). On the Windows platform, Oracle is implemented as a single process with multiple threads. On IBM mainframe systems, running ...

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