Oracle Clusterware manages applications and processes as resources that you register with Oracle Clusterware. The number of resources you register with Oracle Clusterware to manage an application depends on the application. Applications that consist of only one process are usually represented by only one resource. More complex applications, built on multiple processes or components, may require multiple resources.
When you register an application as a resource in Oracle Clusterware, you define how Oracle Clusterware manages the application using resource attributes you ascribe to the resource. The frequency with which the resource is checked and the number of attempts to restart a resource on the same server after a failure before attempting to start it on another server (failover) are examples of resource attributes. The registration information also includes a path to an action script or application-specific action program that Oracle Clusterware calls to start, stop, check, and clean up the application.
An action script is a shell script (a batch script in Windows) that a generic script agent provided by Oracle Clusterware calls. An application-specific agent is usually a C or C++ program that calls Oracle Clusterware-provided APIs directly.
See Also:
Oracle Clusterware Resource Reference for an example of an action script