E Oracle Database Differences on Windows and UNIX

Learn about the differences between Oracle Database on Windows and UNIX. For Oracle Database developers and database administrators moving from a UNIX platform to Windows, this information can be helpful in understanding Windows features that are relevant to Oracle Database.

• Automatic Startup and Shutdown
  On UNIX, several files and scripts in different directories are used to start an instance automatically.
• Background Processing and Batch Jobs
  UNIX provides sophisticated control mechanisms for background processing and batch jobs.
• Diagnostic and Tuning Utilities
  On UNIX, utilities such as sar and vmstat are used to monitor Oracle Database background and shadow processes.
• Direct Writes to Disk
  On both UNIX and Windows platforms, bypassing the file system buffer cache ensures data is written to disk.
• Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs)
  Shared libraries on UNIX are similar to shared DLLs on Windows.
• Hot Backups
  A (manual) hot backup is equivalent to backing up a tablespace that is in an offline backup mode.
• Initialization Parameters: Multiple Database Writers
  On UNIX, you can specify many database writer process with initialization parameter DB_WRITERS.
• Installation Accounts and Groups
  UNIX uses the concept of a DBA group. The root account cannot be used to install Oracle Database.
• Oracle Database Installation
  The following manual setup tasks, all required on UNIX, are not required on Windows:
• Memory Resources
  The resources provided by the UNIX default kernels are often inadequate for a medium or large instance of Oracle Database.
• Microsoft Transaction Server
  Windows coordinates distributed transactions through the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC), one of the components of Microsoft Transaction Server.
• Multiple Oracle Homes and OFA
  The goal of OFA is to place all Oracle Database software under one ORACLE_HOME directory and to spread database files across different physical drives as databases increase in size.
• Oracle Home User and Oracle User
  On Linux and UNIX systems, you must create and use a software owner user account (oracle), and this user must belong to the Oracle Inventory group (oinstall) and also must be a member of the appropriate OSDBA, OSOPER, OSBACKUPDBA, OSDGDBA, and OSKMDBA groups.
• Raw Partitions
  Data files for tablespaces may be stored on a file system or on raw partitions.
• Windows Services
  Windows services are similar to UNIX daemons.