Understand the features Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (Oracle DBCA) offers for creating your Oracle RAC databases.

Oracle DBCA enables you to create both policy-managed and administrator-managed databases. With Oracle DBCA, you can also create site-specific tablespaces as part of database creation. If you have data file requirements that differ from those offered by Oracle DBCA templates, then create your database with Oracle DBCA and modify the data files later. You can also run user-specified scripts as part of your database creation process.

Oracle DBCA also configures your Oracle RAC environment for various Oracle high availability features, such as cluster administration tools. Oracle DBCA also starts any database instances required to support your defined configuration.

You can use Oracle DBCA to create a database from templates supplied by Oracle, or from templates that you create. The templates contain settings optimized for a particular type of workload.

Oracle ships templates for the following two workload types:

• General purpose or transaction processing

• Data warehouse

For more complex environments, you can select the Custom Database option. This option does not use templates and results in a more extensive interview, which means that it takes longer to create your database.

Click Show Details to see the configuration for each type of database. Select the template suited to the type of workload your database supports. If you are not sure which to choose, then select the default General Purpose or Transaction Processing template.