About Maintenance Windows

A maintenance window is a contiguous time interval during which automated maintenance tasks are run. Maintenance windows are Oracle Scheduler windows that belong to the window group named MAINTENANCE_WINDOW_GROUP. A Scheduler window can be a simple repeating interval (such as "between midnight and 6 a.m., every Saturday"), or a more complex interval (such as "between midnight and 6 a.m., on the last workday of every month, excluding company holidays").

When a maintenance window opens, Oracle Database creates an Oracle Scheduler job for each maintenance task that is scheduled to run in that window. Each job is assigned a job name that is generated at run time. All automated maintenance task job names begin with ORA$AT. For example, the job for the Automatic Segment Advisor might be called ORA$AT_SA_SPC_SY_26. When an automated maintenance task job finishes, it is deleted from the Oracle Scheduler job system. However, the job can still be found in the Scheduler job history.

In the case of a very long maintenance window, all automated maintenance tasks except Automatic SQL Tuning Advisor are restarted every four hours. This feature ensures that maintenance tasks are run regularly, regardless of window size.

The framework of automated maintenance tasks relies on maintenance windows being defined in the database. Table 26-1 lists the maintenance windows that are automatically defined with each new Oracle Database installation.