Oracle MAS – Mental Acronym Strategy
April 17, 2007 1 Comment
Reading the latest post on Jonathan Lewis’s excellent blog, I was once again struck by Oracle’s mental acronym strategy, henceforth known, by me, as Oracle MAS.
You have to be careful in discussions – Did they just mention ASM? Or was it ASSM? Or did they mean ASMM?
Bloomin’ ‘eck. It’s all this Automatic … Management that’s to blame. Here’s a recap:
ASM – Automatic Storage Management – a DB-led “solution” for database filesystem / volume management which can stripe and mirror, and also balance IO by redistributing files. Introduced in Oracle 10g.
ASSM – Automatic Segment Space Management – feature that controls how space in a segment is allocated, used and reused. Does away with the need to manually manage settings for FREELISTS, FREELIST GROUPS and PCTUSED (set at a tablespace level). There’s not much comprehensive documentation on it online, almost implying that it’s a no-brainer a bit like LMTs. However, there are always exceptions and there are some articles out there that suggest ASSM as an OLTP only solutions – i.e. not Data Warehouse – and also mention issues for very high-end OLTP sites.
ASMM – Automatic Shared Memory Management – functionality introduced in Oracle 10g to allow Oracle to automatic manage the allocation of SGA components.
OraStory 
Hoo boy! Touched a nerve on this one, ya did!
I did a contract gig at one of the telecoms some years ago. They actually had a toll-free acronym hotline.
As a database company, you might think Oracle would have an acronym database somewhere. Maybe we do, but I just can’t find the url… or is it uri? You know, that html http shttpd xmldb thingie.
Whatever.