Oracle Core: Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers

Targets

Since this book is only a couple of hundred pages and the 11g manuals extend to tens of thousands of pages, it seems unlikely that I could possibly be describing “the whole thing,” so let me qualify the claim. The book is about the core mechanics of the central database engine—the bit that drives everything else; essentially it boils down to undo, redo, data caching, and shared SQL. Even then I've had to be ruthless in eliminating lots of detail and interesting special cases that would make the book too long, turgid, and unreadable. Consider, for example, the simple question: How does Oracle do a logical I/O?, then take a look at structure x$kcbsw, which is a list of all the functions that Oracle might call to visit a block. You will ...