Database Configuration Assistant - Oracle 10g/11g Data and Database Management Utilities - page 269

Manage Templates : This option allows you to manage database templates. A DBCA
template consists of the configuration file and optionally the physical seed database
files. You can create a template from an existing template, an existing database, or, at
database creation.
Instance Management : This option is available only with RAC configurations.
DBCA is a cluster aware tool, and it automatically displays this option in RAC
environments. This option allows you to add or remove an instance to an existing
RAC database.
Service Management : This option is also available only with RAC configurations.
This allows you to distribute the availability of the different services among Oracle
instances. Here you can configure the Transparent Application Failover ( TAF )
policies, and specify the preferred instance where a service will run.
Conigure Automatic Storage Management : If you plan to use ASM as your
database storage manager, then you must first configure the ASM instance. Here you
can configure the disk groups and configure how redundancy will be managed. You
can add disks to existing disk groups or create new disk groups.
Database creation
The DBCA is mostly known as the tool used to create a database. If the DBA
performs a default installation with the database creation option, it can be seen how
the DBCA creates the started database. This section is a walk-through of the DBCA
creating DB screens.
Database templates
Creating a database can of course, be done using the command line CREATE
DATABASE command, but most DBA's prefer using the DBCA because it is pretty easy
and intuitive, and it allows DBA's to easily manage different database options. This
section introduces us to the concepts of templates, and this topic will be developed in
further detail later in this chapter.