Hi guys: I have recently been asked to start supporting some of the Oracle databases we have in the organization. Currenlty I only have very little knowledge of the basic oracle concepts but I guess now I have to know it inside-out.

Some of the fellow members on this forum, I am sure might have went through the same and trying to understand what is an instance, SID, PFILE and all those types of startup questions and how the hell you create, name an instance? and how can I create multiple instances/databases on a server?...lot of questions

Anybody out there willing to share their exprience please do and if you can point to some good documentation that would be just wonderful.


dollar

The tricky thing in the multi-database environments is that one is quite eager to expect things to be similar , while actually there is some much difference. I would suggest doing some training in fundamentals to get the 'grip' of the new RDBMS.
Also look around for papers on migration, these tend to discuss the differences quite extensively .........

This topic has been discussed earlier, and some kind soul wrote a document comparing the two systems:

Database Architectures

Also, "Oracle Concepts" manual makes a good reading. You can find it at otn.oracle.com (free registration needed). Another good resource is asktom.oracle.com.

I have worked for a while on porting code from Oracle to DB2 and always found this guide usefull:

Brilliant!

This might also help. I used this doc to understand DB2.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork.../dm-0401gupta/