VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:55am 521
Glossary
address-length pair
Identifies the starting block address and the length of an extent (in file system or logical blocks).
archived log mode
Used to retrieve information on transactions that occur during a hot backup.
asynchronous I/O
A format of I/O that performs non-blocking reads and writes. This enables the system to handle
multiple I/O requests simultaneously.
autoextend
An Oracle feature that automatically grows a database file by a prespecified size, up to a
prespecified maximum size.
atomic operation
An operation that either succeeds completely or fails and leaves everything as it was before the
operation was started. If the operation succeeds, all aspects of the operation take effect at once and
the intermediate states of change are invisible. If any aspect of the operation fails, then the
operation aborts without leaving partial changes.
backup mode
A state of the Oracle tablespace that lets you perform online backup.
Block-Level Incremental (BLI) Backup
A method used to back up only changed data blocks, not changed files, since the last backup.
block map
A file system is divided into fixed-size blocks when it is created. As data is written to a file, unused
blocks are allocated in ranges of blocks, called extents. The extents are listed or pointed to from the
inode. The term used for the data that represents how to translate an offset in a file to a file system
block is the “block map” for the file.