Oracle Core: Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers

Oracle in Action

So what do you really need to know about how Oracle works? Ultimately it comes down to this:

An end user sends requests in the form of SQL (or PL/SQL) statements to a server process; each statement has to be interpreted and executed; the process has to acquire the correct data in a timely fashion; the process may have to change data in a correct and timely fashion; and the instance has to protect the database from corruption.

All this work has to take place in the context of a multiuser system on which lots of other end users are trying to do the same thing to the same data at the same time. This concurrent leads to these key questions: How can we access data efficiently? How can we modify data efficiently? How can we protect ...