This book is intended for technical managers, DBAs, system administrators, and storage architects who want to understand ASM concepts or who will be implementing ASM. We have designed this book to provide the reader with the essentials of ASM and the best practices for implementation. This design includes a chapter-by-chapter process flow for enabling, configuring, and managing ASM in any environment, as well as ensuring that the databases (relational database management system [RDBMS] instances) are configured correctly to leverage ASM. For those eager to delve “under the hood” of ASM, this book also defines critical ASM internal operations and structures. The last chapter, “From Discussion to Deployment,” covers a very important aspect of getting ASM into the user infrastructure and navigating all the organization boundaries affected by introducing this new technology.

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