A

accent-insensitive sort

A sort operation that uses information only about base letters, not diacritics or case.

Active Session History (ASH)

A rolling buffer in memory that captures session statistics for all active sessions. ASH gathers the statistics from fixed tables once every second. See also Manageability Monitor process; Manageability Monitor Light process.

ADDM

See Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor.

advisors

A collection of services that aid in the optimization of different aspects of the database. Each advisor covers a specific subsystem within the database and can analyze, diagnose, and provide recommendations to eliminate performance issues in the database.

alert log

A special type of Oracle trace file that logs significant database events.

ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROL FILE TO TRACE

See ASCII backup control file.

ANALYZE

A command that analyzes the integrity of a database object.

APMM

See Automatic PGA Memory Management.

ASCII backup control file

A readable character representation of the binary control file. This file is created by the command ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROL FILE TO TRACE.

ASH

See Active Session History.

ASM

See Automatic Storage Management.

ASMM

See Automatic Shared Memory Management.

asynchronous

Asynchronous execution means that a process proceeds independently from another process. For example, a job submitted to the scheduler executes independently from the process that submitted the job.

ATL

See automated tape library.

ATO

See Automatic Tuning Optimizer.

attributes

The characteristics of any scheduler object. These characteristics are defined through procedure parameters when creating the object or through the SET_ATTRIBUTE and SET_ATTRIBUTE_NULL procedures once the object has been created. For example, an object's name, repeat interval, and start date would be some of the object's attributes.

automated channel fail over

An RMAN feature that allows a backup job to complete successfully on one of the remaining allocated channels if one of the allocated channels fails.

automated tape library (ATL)

Third-party tape hardware that automates the backup and recovery to tape process.

automatic channel allocation

Performed by setting the Recovery Manager (RMAN) configuration at the RMAN command prompt. This is done by using the CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE or CONFIGURE DEVICE commands. Automatic channel allocation is automatically used when executing the BACKUP, RESTORE, or DELETE commands.

Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM)

Performs proactive database diagnosis to identify performance issues and bottlenecks within the database. In addition, ADDM will work with other advisors to offer recommendations on how to resolve the problems detected.

Automatic DML Monitoring

One of the Common Manageability Infrastructure's Automated Maintenance Tasks, it will detect stale and/or missing statistics on database objects.

Automatic PGA Memory Management (APMM)

Oracle functionality that simplifies PGA memory management by dynamically allocating SQL work area memory to user sessions. See also PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET.

Automatic Shared Memory Management (ASMM)

Oracle functionality that simplifies SGA memory management by dynamically sizing SGA memory components for optimum performance.

Automatic SQL Tuning

SQL tuning functionality designed into the query optimizer. By switching the query optimizer into tuning mode, the query optimizer becomes the Automatic Tuning Optimizer (ATO). The ATO performs analysis on SQL statements and produces recommendations to improve performance. See also Automatic Tuning Optimizer.

automatic statistics collection

One of the Common Manageability Infrastructure's Automated Maintenance Tasks, it is responsible for gathering optimizer statistics for objects in the database and storing them in the data dictionary.

Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

A cluster file system that can be used with either stand-alone Oracle instances or with Oracle RAC to provide a vertically integrated subsystem encapsulating a file system, a volume manager, and a fault-tolerant environment specifically designed for Oracle databases.

Automatic Tuning Optimizer (ATO)

The name for the Oracle query optimizer when it is in tuning mode. In this mode, the optimizer analyzes SQL statements for ways to improve performance. Rather than an execution plan, however, the ATO returns recommendations to implement SQL changes. See also Automatic SQL Tuning; SQL Tuning Advisor.

Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)

The central element of Oracle Database 10g's Common Manageability Infrastructure. AWR provides services to collect, process, maintain, and access performance statistics for the database. These statistics can be used to detect performance problems and for self-tuning purposes. AWR is made up of two distinct parts: the statistics collection facility and the workload repository. AWR collects statistics every 30 minutes.

automatically sized components

SGA memory components that are dynamically sized by ASMM. These include the database buffer cache, the shared pool, the Java pool, and the large pool.

AWR

See Automatic Workload Repository.