Being an Oracle DBA we have learned about ASM and its qualities. Today we are going to learn about ASM Clients. We all are aware that Oracle ASM is a volume manager and file system for Oracle database files. Let’s start to have knowledge of ASM Client. Clients that connect directly to ASM.
- Oracle Database:- This is the most fundamental ASM client. It makes requests of ASM relating to numerous types of activities of activities example file creation.
- ASM Cluster File system:- It depends on ASM to provide the ASM volumes.
- ASM Clusterware:- When the OCR(Oracle Cluster Registry), voting files, or ASM server, SPfile(Server parameter file), is stored on ASM disk group, the ASM Instance is a client of itself.
- ASMCA:- it is GUI that allows you to manage ASM instance, disk group, and volumes.
- Enterprise Manager:- It allows for DBA to manage and monitor the ASM instance directly and indirectly through the database.
- SQL clients:- It provides the most fundamental management client for ASM for ASM-specific SQL commands.
- Grid Infrastructure:- It uses ASM to store the OCR and voting disk files by default.
- ASMCMD:- ASM command line interface is used to interrogate and manage ASM. It includes many UNIX-like commands that can be used to manage the files and directories in an ASM system.
Oracle provides some other clients that connect to ASM directly, there are a series of interfaces provided by Oracle Database that can be used to manipulate ASM in various different ways.
- XML DB:- With the help of XML DB ASM files and directories can be accessed through a virtual folder in the XML DB repository. XML DB provides a means to access and manipulate the ASM files and directories with programmatic APIs.
- DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER:- The DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER provides procedures to copy ASM files within a database or the transfer binary files between local ASM instance and remote database files .
- Oracle Recovery Manager:- It is well integrated with ASM and can be used to migrate non-ASM databases into ASM.
- SQL:- When an Oracle Database is managed under ASM, activities that create and delete ASM files will implicitly with the underlying ASMintsnace. A database instance will also directly read and write ASM files as result SQL DML commands. This operation that involves space management will also require interaction with the ASM instance.
I hope the above knowledge add some more gemstone to the Oracle’s knowledge treasures.
