All types of database files used in Oracle DB

All types of database files used in Oracle DB

The physical structure of the Oracle DB consists of three file types, which are:-

• Datafiles - as the name suggests, these type of files store the data on disk.These files are almost always written only by the Mandatory Background process named DBWR (Database Writer). There are only a few exceptions when these files are written by some other system processes. From the logical structure of Oracle DB, we can visualize that Datafiles reside in the logical container of the tables and indexes. This container is called 'Tablespaces'.
• Control files - these are binary files and they store information about the database, such as name of the database. The control files contain so vital information that the Oracle DB won't start if these files are not available. Probably that's the reason why Oracle allows to maintain duplicate copies of control files. This process is called multiplexing of control files and it'll always be a good idea to keep duplicate copies on separate disks for obvious reasons.
• Redo Log files - these files are used to record all the changes made to the Oracle DB. These files comes very handy in situation like DB crash. Suppose you have scheduled periodic backup every 15 days and if the disk crashes on say 14th day then it may be quite difficult to recover the data in absence of these redo log files. Redo log files will be of so much help in this case that you will simply need to restart the database to recover all the lost data. These Redo Log files are online log files and Oracle DB requires at least two online Redo Log files. When one is full it switches to the other. You can have multiplexed Redo Log files as well and for that'll be handy if these online Redo Log files themsevles get corrupted.

In addition to these three types of files, Oracle DB uses many other types of files as well and each of these files have their own special uses. Some of these file types are:-

• Parameter file - this file is also called init.ora in Oracle DB. It contains the configuration details which are used for during startup of the database. Some of the information contained by this file is: the location of the Control files, the size of RAM the Oracle DB would be using, location of the trace files, etc. As you can easily understand that without these information, the database won't start. Oracle DB supports two types of parameter files: One, Manual parameter file which is also known as PFILE and Two, server side parameter file aka SPFILE.
• Trace files - Oracle DB creates these files in many cases including session failure, disk crash, etc. It can be created by issuing commands by users of Oracle DB as well.
• Networking configuration files - tnsnames.ora and listener.ora fall in this category of files. As the name suggests, these files are used to store the configuration details of the different network components used by the underlying Oracle DB.
• Oracle Binary files - these binary files contain the instructions to run the Oracle DB.