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INTEGRATION OF ORACLE8I WITH DIFFERENT WINDOWS NT TOOLS
There are a variety of ways in which you can integrate Oracle8i with Windows NT
as described below:
- Installation of Oracle on Windows NT is a very simple matter and involves
running setup.exe for the appropriate hardware from the CD-ROM. If desired the
starter database can be created as part of the installation. The instance
manager can be used to create new instances and databases. The following
scripts can be modified to create a new database: initSID.ora, build_db.sql and
buildall.sql.
- Windows NT registry: NT uses the concept of a registry, which centrally
stores all the hardware and software parameters. All the Oracle specific
environment variables like ORACLE_HOME , ORACLE_SID etc. are placed in the
registry. The registry is fault-tolerant to operating system failures and is
very robust. Oracle records all of its information in the NT registry under the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE hive. These entries include: NLS_LANG,
ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID, ORA_sid_WORKINGSETMAX , ORA_sid_WORKINGSETMIN,
ORA_SHUTDOWN (specifies whether an IMMEDIATE shutdown should be performed when
the service or an Oracle instance is stopped from the Control Panel),
ORA_SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT( Specifies a timeout period for an IMMEDIATE shutdown that
is indicated when the service is stopped), variable declarations for use in
SQL*PLUS and product specific variables. The registry can be viewed and
modified directly using the registry editor tool "REGEDT32.EXE". It is however
recommended that you should not manipulate the registry directly without fully
understanding the purpose of the particular change because errors in the
registry can prevent an application from running or cause Windows NT to be
unable to start up or run reliably.
- Windows NT Services and background processes: Oracle instance runs as a
Service in Windows NT and therefore it can be used to automatically start the
database without a user logging on the system. For every Oracle instance on
Windows NT there is an ORACLESERVICEsid and an optional ORACLESTARTsid (present
only if configured for autostart) service. The OracleServiceSID is the Oracle
instance while the OracleStartSID is used to automatically start the database
on server boot. If the OracleStartSID service is not seen in the
Control/Services then run the instance manager and edit the instance to create
the missing service. The OracleStart service for a particular instance if
configured to start automatically will basically execute a file called
"strt<sid>.cmd" in the %ORACLE_HOME%\database directory. You can modify the
contents of this file and thereby perform a sequence of steps with every
startup of the database. The registry entries for the Oracle services can be
viewed by starting the Registry Editor and navigating to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE|SYSTEM|CURRENTCONTROLSET|SERVICES. The OracleTNSListener
service, commonly referred to as the "listener" provides Net8 connectivity from
a Net8 client to an Oracle instance. Local or remote connections to a local
Oracle instance using Net8 protocols, such as TCP/IP or Named Pipes requires
that a listener service should be running on the Oracle host machine. While
users are connected to the database the listener service should not be stopped
because when a user connects to Oracle in the dedicated server mode then the
user's socket connection is merely routed from the listener to the database
instance, rather than being released and therefore both the listener and the
database service are using the same port. If you modify the LISTENER.ORA to
listen for connections to a new database then you can use the LSNRCTRL utility
with the RELOAD command.
- The Windows NT scheduler can be used to schedule jobs and Windows NT scripts
can be used to create batch jobs.
- Disk Administrator: Common RAID levels in Oracle8 installations:
- RAID level 0: Enables high-performance, non-fault tolerance disk striping. It
places multiple physical disks into one logical whole and data operations are
broken into [#ofdrives] chunks and all the disks are simultaneously accessed.
It does not provide fault tolerance and therefore when one disk fails the whole
logical volume fails and has to be restored from a backup.
- RAID level 1: Also referred to as disk mirroring where every write is
duplicated on another drive. This has a performance penalty but provides fault
tolerance because if the mirrored disk fails, the mirrored drive is brought on-
line in real-time. The mirror configuration is re-established after the faulted
drive is replaced.
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RAID 0+1: This is a mixture of RAID 0 and RAID 1 providing high-performance and
fault tolerance. It enables mirroring of an array of striped hard disks.
RAID 5: It provides a cost-effective alternative to disk mirroring. In RAID 5
multiple hard disks are combined into a striped logical volume like in RAID 1
but each drive contains parity information such that any single drive failure
is tolerated. With one drive failure the RAID 5 system allows continued access
but the performance suffers.
- The Disk Administrator can be used to setup different disk configurations.
Raw partitions can also be created using this tool.
- Event Viewer: It is a Windows NT tool that allows the administrator to use
system alert messages and set up alerts to automate a reaction to those alerts.
Oracle has integrated with this tool and provides information like
startup/shutdown and OS audit trail in the application and the security log.
- Performance Monitor: It is a Windows NT tool that provides detailed resource
utilization information through logging, charting and also allows you to save
the logs from a specified time period for future analysis. The information is
provided using a variety of counters and Oracle has integrated with this tool
to provide Oracle specific performance counters like library cache hit ratio,
disk utilization and others.
- User Manager: Using the NT User Manager utility Oracle allows the external
assignment of database roles. The roles are created within Oracle but they are
associated with NT user accounts by an NT administrator outside of Oracle. The
limitation of this strategy is that it is an all-or-nothing feature such that
if it is used then all the roles must be externally assigned.
- Windows NT Diagnostics: Winmsd.exe is a graphical tool that displays computer
hardware and operating system information. Information displayed includes:
- -Services and Devices along with their status.
- -Environment variables
- -Operating system version and service pack information.
- -Network statistics
- -Information about physical and virtual memory
- Oracle8i Wizards: There are several new wizards provided by Oracle8 that can
be used to simplify the management of Oracle databases on Windows NT.
- -Oracle Database Assistant can be used to quickly create databases.
- -Oracle Data Migration Assistant simplifies and automates the migration of
Oracle7 for Windows NT databases to Oracle8i for Windows NT.
- -Oracle Web Publishing Assistant can be used to manipulate data in the HTML
format.
- -Oracle Migration Assistant for MS Access can be used to simplify the
migration of schema or data or both from MS Access database to Oracle8i
for Windows NT.
- -Oracle Net8 Assistant can be used to quickly configure Oracle8 Networking.
- Open data access: A variety of standard data access methods such as ODBC,
Oracle Objects for OLE, JDBC, and native Oracle drivers can be used to provide
open data access allowing Oracle8i on Windows NT to integrate in any
environment.
- Oracle8i Cartridges: A number of Cartridges are available to expand Oracle8i
to meet future demands.
- Context Cartridge enables the management of text data with the same security,
scalability and integrity that structured data is managed.
- Spatial Data Cartridge enables the manipulation of spatial data in the same
manner that it manipulates structured data.
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- Image Cartridge allows the storage, retrieval and processing of bitmapped
indexes.
- Video Cartridge allows the manipulation and transfer of audio and video from
the server to a client over the network.
- The data cartridge architecture is open and allows the capabilities to be
easily extended by means of customized cartridges.
- NT Resource kit is a separate product for NT Server and NT workstation and it
contains some very useful utilities. The Windows NT resource kit provides a
variety of useful tools that can be used to simplify the administration of
Oracle on Windows NT. Examples of some of these commands include DUMPEL.exe 9it
can be used to dump the vent log of a local or remote system into a tab
separated text file), KILL.exe (allows you to kill processes by process id,
process name or window title), TLIST.exe (it provides a list of tasks currently
running on the system), PERFMTR.exe (performance information), PSTAT.exe (it
gives the status of currently running processes and threads along with their
priorities), PFMON.exe (allows you to monitor the hard and soft page faults
generated by each function call by an application and SC.exe (it can be used to
communicate with the NT service controller and services).
- The NT Task Manager can be used to obtain information about Oracle such as
the PID, CPU time, memory usage etc. The Task Manager also includes the
functionality to end a process.
- NT is multitasking in the true sense and will try to parallelize command
scripts automatically e.g. if you create a batch script to (i) run a script to
generate a report and (ii) print the report then NT will run both of them in
parallel and result in error there you should provide hints to Windows NT to
prevent errors. START /W PLUSS33 system/manager@2:ORCL @test.sql copy test.txt
c:\archive
- Many of the graphical utilities have a corresponding command-line version and
it is useful to be acquainted with both of these because sometimes a feature is
available in one but not the other.
- Oracle Enterprise Manager is a GUI tool that simplifies the administration of
Oracle from a central location. A repository is created during installation of
OEM which keeps all the information related to Oracle instances and database
objects. OEM consists of a centralized console, a set of common services,
intelligent agents and a package of standard database administrator
applications. It allows the central administration of multiple remote servers.
Database administrators can schedule and automate jobs and events on specific
objects or group of objects. You can separately purchase the tuning and
diagnostic packs for Oracle Enterprise Manager to assist in database
performance diagnosis and tuning, application performance monitoring and
advanced event management.
- NT allows you to create an Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) which can be used
during recovery in case of an Operating system crash. The repair disk contains
configuration files and can be used to fix corrupt system files. Windows NT
supports RAID 0,1 and 5. NT also provides software drivers for UPS in case of a
power outage. NT supports both raw devices and file systems.
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