OCA Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration I: A Real-World Certification Guide

Understanding Oracle Memory Management

As we've mentioned a number of times earlier, one of the most crucial aspects of database performance is memory management. Improperly sized memory caches can quickly lead to degraded performance of applications and user queries. Memory management is also one of the most configurable aspects of the database. We can use the database initialization parameters to easily change the amount of memory used by Oracle, and how that memory is distributed. However, Oracle also gives us the opportunity to release some of that responsibility and allows the database kernel itself to handle memory management, increasing or decreasing the size of various caches as needed. When memory is managed in this way, there is no interruption ...