Apart from your browser, you will not need any special software to complete the lessons, exercises, and quizzes associated with this course. We recommend that you take advantage of a special offer from Oracle and download the 30-day trial version of Oracle8 Server Enterprise Edition available from the
Oracle Database Software Downloads. This is a complete working copy that provides all the functionality of the full version. At the Oracle store, you can also order the Oracle Net8 Administrator Guide and the Net8 Quick Reference Guide.
You also may be able to get assistance from your local Oracle administrator.
Finally, we recommend that you obtain the tools available on the Oracle Net8 Client CD-ROM. This CD-ROM ships with Oracle8 Server Enterprise
Edition and contains a full set of Oracle networking documentation for both Oracle7 and Oracle8, along with many of the tools that you will
learn to use in this course.
The (PGA) Oracle Process Global Area is a memory structure that is associated with each Oracle server process.
It stores data and control information for the process, such as session-specific data and sort buffers.
The PGA is separate from the System Global Area (SGA) and is not shared among multiple database sessions.
The PGA may consist of the following components:
- Stack space: This is memory used to store the local variables and arrays for each session.
- Session memory: This is memory used to store data specific to a particular session, such as bind variables and runtime memory for PL/SQL execution.
- Sort area: This is memory used to perform Oracle sorts, such as those required for ORDER BY clauses or GROUP BY clauses in SQL statements.
- Hash area: This is memory used to store hash tables, which are used to perform hash joins and hash aggregates in SQL statements.
- Bitmap merge area: This is memory used to perform bitmap merge operations, which are used to improve the performance of queries that use bitmap indexes.
- Runtime memory: This is memory used to store data structures required at runtime, such as the call stack and cursor context areas.
