Automatic Storage Management: Automatic Storage Management in 10g and 11g is one of the best options to control the

storage. What is ASM? Automatic Storage Management is an extension of Oracle 9i OMF. The OMF functionality includes mirroring and stripping to provide balanced and secure storage. The entire storage activity was done by the Oracle. Earlier version we have seen that LMT and ASSM and Dictionary Managed Tablespaces, which LMT and ASSM given tremendous performance. This will created a separate instance for ASM and manage the entire space. On 10g there are bugs reported, but most of the bugs has been fixed on 11g. 11g Release 2 recently launched by Oracle having most of the file system supported by Oracle ASM. Applying ASM, now the dba and storage professional can be relaxed, since this has been automated by Oracle. All Oracle Datafiles, controlfiles and logs file will be handled by ASM. Entire functionality of the ASM controlled by a separate ASM instance. This is only memory structured instance and it does not have any databases. ASM Features supports It support large files It will give the maximum i/o balancing without any manual tuning It will manage group of disks. It will manage Disk Redundancy within the disk group itself. As always the disk group is the main components in any storage, similarly in the case ASM, the disk groups are the main component. Precisely server physical disks are controlled by a single storage unit. The location, names of the files controlled by ASM Instance only. Level of redundancy and stripping can be controlled by using templates. Oracle ASM provided the default templates for each type of files. If any one wanted to add the additional templates, it possible on ASM ASM disks are physical disks and within the disk files known as ASM files.

ASM instance includes: INSTANCE_TYPE One can set to ASM or RDBMS depending on the instance type(The default is RDBMS). DB_UNIQUE_NAME A unique name for the database ASM_DISKGROUPS During instance startup, the list of disk groups should be mounted by ASM Instance ASM_POWER_LIMIT Rebalancing operation maximum power on an ASM. The default is 1 and the maximum 11 ASM can be created manually or using gui tool database configuration assistant. Dictionary Views: V$ASM_TEMPLATE, V$ASM_OPERATION, V$ASM_FILE, V$ASM_DISKGROUP, V$ASM_CLIENT, V$ASM_ALIAS, etc. OMF Advantages: There is no need to specify the location, size or name of the data files when creating tablespaces. The applications vendor need not worry about Operating System specific file name conventions.