Lesson 1

Welcome to Extended Database Features, the last of five courses in the Oracle Database Administration Certification Series. Taken together, these courses teach you to create and manage an Oracle database.

This course focuses on the structures within an Oracle database. After completing this course, you willl be able to:

1. Use partitioned tables to improve performance and reduce maintenance time
2. Use clustered tables and indexes to improve the retrieval performance of your Oracle database
3. Understand and use index-organized tables
4. Audit the database activity for your Oracle database
5. Use your Oracle database to store non-English data
6. Use product profiles to control access to features and data
7. Use triggers to extend the functional capabilities of your Oracle database

Partitioned indexes offer many advantages over their non-partitioned counterparts. The key advantages of using partitioned indexes include:

1. Performance benefits
   1) Loading data via DML operations, 2) Loading data via DDL operations, 3) Querying data via SELECT statements.
2. Maintenance benefits
   1) Rebuilding indexes, 2) Setting indexes unusable or invisible at a partition-level.

You can create partitioned indexes either as locally partitioned or globally partitioned. Locally partitioned indexes can only exist on partitioned tables, while globally partitioned indexes can be created on partitioned or non-partitioned tables. You can also create non-partitioned indexes on partitioned tables. The most common configuration for partitioned indexes is to create locally partitioned indexes on a partitioned table, simply because the overall benefits and trade-offs of this configuration generally beat out both globally partitioned and non-partitioned indexes on partitioned tables.

This course, in conjunction with the other four courses in the Oracle Database Administration Certification Series, will prepare you for the following Oracle certification exam:
Oracle DBA Certification
This database administration exam is one of five exams that you must pass in order to earn certification as an Oracle database administrator.
The next lesson discusses the course database.