Managing Your Database: A Roadmap

The following are some specific tasks to perform to become familiar with your database. They are presented as links to the chapters that contain information about these tasks and other related database management tasks.

1. Start up your instance and open the database. At the end of installation, your instance is already started and your database is open. In the future there will be times, perhaps for doing database maintenance or because of a power or media failure, that you shut down your database or instance and later restart it. See "Shutting Down and Restarting the Instance and Database with Enterprise Manager".

2. Optionally configure the network environment to enable clients to connect to your database. See Chapter 4, "Configuring the Network Environment".

3. Review your database storage structure: tablespaces and datafiles, redo log files, and control files. See Chapter 6, "Managing Database Storage Structures".

4. Review, unlock, and reset passwords as necessary for initial database users. Create new users and assign privileges and roles to them. See Chapter 7, "Administering Users and Security".

5. Create users and necessary schema objects, including tablespaces and tables. Populate tables with data. See Chapter 8, "Managing Schema Objects".

6. Review a backup strategy for the database and back up the database. See Chapter 9, "Performing Backup and Recovery".

7. Enable archiving of redo logs, if not already done. See "Configuring Your Database for Basic Backup and Recovery".

8. Monitor database performance, diagnose performance problems and tune the database as necessary. See Chapter 10, "Monitoring and Tuning the Database".

9. Keep Oracle software up-to-date with the latest patch releases. See Chapter 11, "Managing Oracle Software".