Oracle Database Architecture

An Oracle database is a collection of data treated as a unit. The purpose of a database is to store and retrieve related information. A database server is the key to solving the problems of information management. In general, a server reliably manages a large amount of data in a multiuser environment so that many users can concurrently access the same data.


All this is accomplished while delivering high performance. A database server also prevents unauthorized access and provides efficient solutions for failure recovery.Oracle Database is the first database designed for enterprise grid computing, the most flexible and cost effective way to manage information and applications. Enterprise grid computing creates large pools of industry-standard, modular storage and servers. With this architecture, each new system can be rapidly provisioned from the pool of components.

There is no need for peak workloads, because capacity can be easily added or reallocated from the resource pools as needed.

The database has logical structures and physical structures. Because the physical and logical structures are separate, the physical storage of data can be managed without affecting the access to logical storage structures.This learn oracle article contains the following topics :


Physical Database Structure
Logical Database Structure
An Oracle Instance

Learn Oracle - Physical Database Structures

Datafiles - Every Oracle database has one or more physical datafiles. The datafiles contain all the database data. The data of logical database structures, such as tables and indexes, is physically stored in the datafiles allocated for a database.

The characteristics of datafiles are:

A datafile can be associated with only one database.Datafiles can have certain characteristics set to let them automatically extend when the database runs out of space.One or more datafiles form a logical unit of database storage called a tablespace.

Data in a datafile is read, as needed, during normal database operation and stored in the memory cache of Oracle. For example, assume that a user wants to access some data in a table of a database.

If the requested information is not already in the memory cache for the database, then it is read from the appropriate datafiles and stored in memory. Modified or new data is not necessarily written to a datafile immediately.

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