9.10. Exam Essentials

Enumerate the benefits and characteristics of Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Understand how ASM can relieve you of manually optimizing I/O across all files in the tablespace by using ASM disk groups. Show how ASM operations can be performed online with minimal impact to ongoing database transactions.

Be able to create an ASM instance and configure its initialization parameters. Understand the new initialization parameters INSTANCE_TYPE, ASM_POWER_LIMIT, ASM_DISKSTRING, and ASM_DISKGROUPS. Configure DB_UNIQUE_NAME and LARGE_POOL_SIZE for an ASM instance. Start up and shut down an ASM instance, noting the dependencies with database instances that are using the ASM instance's disk groups.

Understand the architecture of an ASM instance. Enumerate the different states for an ASM instance. Describe what happens when an ASM instance is shut down normally or is aborted. List the differences between an RDBMS instance and an ASM instance.

Understand how ASM filenames are constructed and used when creating Oracle objects.

Differentiate how different ASM filename formats are used and files are created depending on whether the file is an existing ASM file, whether a new ASM file is being created, or whether multiple ASM files are being created. Understand the different system templates for creating ASM files with the associated filename and how the characteristics are applied to the ASM files. Show how ASM files are used in SQL commands.

Be able to create, drop, and alter ASM disk groups. Define multiple failure groups for new disk groups and make sure you understand how the number of failure groups is different for two-way and three-way mirroring. Show how disk rebalancing can be controlled or rolled back.

Identify the steps involved in converting non-ASM files to ASM files using RMAN. Migrate a database to ASM disk groups by shutting down the database, editing the SPFILE, running an RMAN script for each file to be converted, and opening the database with RESETLOGS.