oracle database and instance and oracle SID

 

Database:
A collection of physical operating system files or disks, When using Oracle Automatic Storage Management or RAW patitions, the database
may not appear individual, separate files in the operating system, but the definition remains the same

 

Instance:
A set of Oracle background processes or theads and a shared memory area, which is memory that is shared across those threads or processes running on a single computer.This is the place for volatile, nonpersistent stuf,some of which gets flushed to disk, A database instance can exist without any disk storage whatsover.It might not be the most useful thing in the world, but thinking about it that way definitely helps draw the line between the instance and the database;The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably,but they embrace very different comncepts. The relationship between them is that a database may be mounted and opened by many instances.an instance may mount and open just a single database at any point in time

 

Oracle SID:

The SID is a site identifier. It and ORACLE_HOME are hashed together in unix to create a unique key name for creating or attaching a Shared GLobal Area memory region. If your ORACLE_SID or ORACLE_HOME is not set correctly,you will get the ORACLE NOT AVALABLE error, since you can not attach to a shared memory segment that is identified by this unique key. On windows,shared memory isn't used in the same fashion as on unix,but the SID is still important. you can have more than one database under the same ORACLE_HOME, so you need a way to uniquely identify the instance associated with each one, along with their configuration files