Automatic shared memory management and Automatic PGA memory management were features in 10g that enabled users to automate the memory allocation for various sub areas in the SGA and PGA.
Oracle introduced Automatic Memory Management in 11g. This now enables to manage total memory allocated to oracle (SGA+PGA) in an automated fashion. You allocate the total memory allocated to Oracle and the Oracle database dynamically exchanges memory between the SGA and the instance PGA as needed (Based on the workload). Oracle also tunes the sizes of individual SGA components and of the individual PGA’s.
Automatic memory management is supported on Linux,Solaris, Windows, HP-UX and AIX.
You can set memory_target to a value that will be a sum of the memory that you want to allocate fot the SGA and the PGA.
You can set memory_max_target to a value higher than memory_target so that you can increase the memory allocated for oracle if you desire.
You should then set the sga_target and pga_aggregate_target to 0, so that Automatic memory management can tune the space allocation,up or down, for PGA and SGA without any restrictions.
If you set a value for sga_target and pga_aggregate_target then they will be considered as minimum values for the SGA and PGA sizes. If you set a value for sga_target and not for pga_aggregate_target you will auto-tune both parameters. Pga_Aggregate_target is automatically initialized to be memory_target – sga_target.
If neither are set then they are auto tuned by allocating 60% to the SGA and 40% to the PGA.
