There are two basic ways to connect to an Oracle database:

1. as an administrative user and
2. as a normal user.

For 90% of the tasks that you do, you will find that you can connect either way and it will not matter. Any priviledged user can connect normally to the database and still be able to run queries, create and alter schema objects, and so forth. However, to start up or shut down a database, recover a database, or create a new database, you must be connected as an administrator. The keyword internal represents one way to tell Server Manager that you want to connect as an administrator. Two other keywords may also be used. These are SYSDBA and SYSOPER. In order to use SYSDBA and SYSOPER, you must configure a database password file. We will do that in, Managing Users and Connectivity, the next course in this series.