The more you know about Oracle the easier it is to say that what constitutes "best practice" changes depending upon many factors including SLA, business rules, product version: Best practice isn't just about technology.

This page, and its links, should not be interpreted as being the "right" answer ... but rather a best attempt to point to factors that should be considered in putting together your internal guidelines. Think of it as a list of practices that should be considered.

• Block Change Tracking

• If every index is a B*Tree index ... reconsider the design decisions
• If your index is supporting a primary key and PCT_FREE is not set to 0 ... reconsider your design decisions
• Have you used MONITORING to verify indexes are being used?
• Consider using Function Based Indexes. Especially to enforce business rules and in cases where the cardinality is skewed and a B*Tree index might not be used most of the time.
• Will you be running queries where you are looking for NULL? If so consider the use of function based indexes with an expression that substitutes a value for NULL.

• If every table is a heap table ... reconsider the design decisions
• If you are using the default values for PCT_FREE and PCT_USED ... reconsider your design decisions
• Have you considered index-organized tables for lookup tables and other purposes? 
• ROWDEPENDENCIES
• ROW MOVEMENT

• There is essentially no valid reason to use a cursor loop in any version of Oracle since 9.0.1. If you are about to create a cursor loop ... stop ... and write the code using BULK COLLECT with the LIMIT clause and FORALL to perform the insert, update, and/or delete.

• If you are writing code that tests whether a record already exists, updates it if it does and inserts if it does not ... use a MERGE instead.

• The best solution is not always SQL*Loader. Look at external tables, look at using the UTL_FILE built-in package. If the data includes BLOBs consider UTL_FILE, DBMS_LOB, and Intermedia.

• If a column contains no NULLs then create a NOT NULL constraint in cases where it will improve the quality of information available to the Cost Based Optimizer. For example.

• Put all PL/SQL procedures and functions into packages
• In each package put a WHOAMI function that returns the package's version information.
  For example:
  
  FUNCTION whoami RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
    RETURN 'My Package, Version 1.1.5, 29-Feb-2008';
  END whoami;

     Thanks to Ed Prochak for the suggestion.

• Enable Force Logging
• Enable Supplemental Logging