Tuning memory to avoid Operating System paging

Tuning memory is a task common to both the database administrators and the system administrators. However, the DBA's task is to optimize the use of the memory available to the database instance, while the system administrator will focus on the overall memory available to the system and on how to divide it among the required applications and users.

It's common best practice to have a dedicated system to manage the database, not sharing it with other applications. The system administrator and DBA tasks are very similar, so this is often the same person.

In this recipe, we will see how to configure the total memory size of our database instance to avoid problems related to the use of virtual memory and pagination.

How to do it...

The following steps will demonstrate how to tune memory to avoid Operating System paging:

1. Connect to the database as SYSDBA using SQL*Plus:

   CONNECT / AS SYSDBA
   

2. Show the allocated memory to the System Global Area (SGA):

   SHOW...