Server Manager is a command-line utility used to manage an Oracle database. It is present in every Oracle installation, and is primarily used for the following tasks:

1. Starting a database
   
2. Shutting down a database
   
3. Running various Oracle-supplied DBA scripts
   
4. Creating a database
   
5. Executing SQL commands for the purpose of creating and managing users, space, tables, and other database objects.

There is a GUI version of Server Manager available that is currently only supported under UNIX, and only using X-Windows . The GUI version provides the following extra functionality:

1. A real-time monitoring function
   
2. GUI screens to create and modify users, tables, indexes, tablespaces, and so forth.

Oracle is slowly winding down support for Server Manager, and is promoting Enterprise Manager as the GUI tool of choice for managing Oracle databases. The command-line functionality of Server Manager is being folded into SQL*Plus, and you can expect Server Manager not to be supported in some future release of Oracle.
In this course we will be using Server Manager because it can be used with all current releases of Oracle. If you are using release 8.1 or above, the same commands should work from SQL*Plus as well.