pat98's always & forever

Applies to:

Oracle Server - Enterprise Edition - Version: 10G
Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Goal

How to use Very Large Memory, higher than 4Gb on Windows 2003 32 bit
VLM and AWE are for 32-bit Windows environments only

Solution

We can make use of more than 4 GB of RAM on Windows using the AWE(Advanced Windowing Extentions).

The Steps we need to do are

1- Enabling support at the OS level
AWE can be enabled at the OS by adding the /PAE switch to the boot.ini as such:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server" /PAE

2- Enabling AWE Support at the Database/Instance Level:

To enable the AWE implementation on Oracle, you must set the following parameter in the
init file (or spfile) used to start the instance:

USE_INDIRECT_DATA_BUFFERS=TRUE
buffer cache MUST be defined using the parameter DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS

3- In order to take advantage of the additional memory afforded through PAE,the operating system
user account which is used to start the OracleService must be granted the 'Lock Pages in Memory'
system privilege at the operating system level. By default, the OracleService starts as the
LocalSystem account. The LocalSystem account has the privilege to Lock Pages in Memory granted to
it by default.