Network connection betweenyou and the instance

Chapter 5

•� Background processes: These are the processes that start up with the database and perform various maintenance tasks, such as writing blocks to disk, maintaining the online redo log, cleaning up aborted processes, maintaining Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and so on.

•� Slave processes: These are similar to background processes, but they are processes that perform extra work on behalf of either a background or a server process.

you see on UNIX/Linux, the term process is totally appropriate. If you are using a single-process implementation of Oracle,

such as you see on Windows, the term process will actually mean thread within the Oracle process. So, for example,

Chapter 5 ■ OraCLe prOCeSSeS

a connection is just a physical path between a client process and an Oracle instance (e.g., a network connection between

you and the instance). a session, on the other hand, is a logical entity in the database, where a client process can execute

Dedicated Server Connections

In dedicated server mode, there will be a one-to-one mapping between a client connection and a server process (or thread, as the case may be). If you have 100 dedicated server connections on a UNIX/Linux machine, there will be 100 processes executing on their behalf. Graphically, it looks as shown in Figure 5-1.

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