Managing Your Database: An Overview

This section provides an overview of the tasks involved in managing an Oracle database instance. Each chapter in this guide describes a different task in detail.

To manage your Oracle database:

  1. Start the database instance.

    After the installation, your instance is started and your database is open. In the future, there will be times, perhaps for doing database maintenance or because of a power or media failure, that you shut down your database instance and later restart it.

    See "Shutting Down and Starting Up the Oracle Instance".

  2. Optionally, configure the network environment to enable clients to connect to your database.
  3. Review your database storage structures: tablespaces and data files, online redo log files, and control files. Create or modify storage structures as needed.
  4. Review memory allocation and adjust as needed.
  5. Review, unlock, and reset passwords for predefined database users as needed. Create new users, and assign privileges and roles to them.
  6. Create the necessary schema objects, including tables, views, and indexes. Populate the tables with data.
  7. Create or review the backup strategy for the database and back up the database.
  8. Enable archiving of online redo log files, if not already done.
  9. Monitor database performance, diagnose performance problems, and tune the database as necessary.
  10. Keep Oracle Database software up-to-date with the latest releases.