Oracle Components
Oracle consists of a database and an instance.
- A database includes all the physical data files, control files, and redo log files that will hold your data and Oracle’s metadata information.
- An instance is a combination of the pool of physical memory (RAM) allocated to Oracle, referred to as the System Global Area (SGA), and the background processes that Oracle spawns to use this memory pool.
- SGA: Area where Oracle attempts to cache database data for faster access (RAM I/O is about 1000x faster than disk I/O).