Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle 5.0 Administrator's Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, Second Edition, December 2008

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.
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.
autoextend An Oracle feature that automatically grows a database file by a prespecified size,
up to a prespecified maximum size.
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.
boot disk A disk used for booting an operating system.
buffered I/O A mode of I/O operation (where I/O is any operation, program, or device that
transfers data to or from a computer) that first transfers data into the Operating
System buffer cache.
cache Any memory used to reduce the time required to respond to an I/O request. The
read cache holds data in anticipation that it will be requested by a client. The write
cache holds data written until it can be safely stored on non-volatile storage media.
Cached Quick I/O Cached Quick I/O allows databases to make more efficient use of large system
memory while still maintaining the performance benefits of Quick I/O. Cached
Quick I/O provides an efficient, selective buffering mechanism to complement
asynchronous I/O.
Glossary