Product Description

Written by experienced Oracle insiders, this essential guide distills a vast amount of information into an easy-to-read volume that covers every aspect of the Oracle database. Readers of all technical levels will learn about Oracle's features and technologies, including the product line, architecture, data structures, networking, concurrency, tuning and much more. Augmented with illustrations and helpful hints, the fourth edition of "Oracle Essentials" offers a valuable one-stop overview of Oracle Database 11g, Oracle's newest database release. Recent releases such as Oracle 10g and 9i are also covered. More comprehensible than huge complete references, and more detailed than most primers, this book gives current Oracle users the conceptual background they need to understand how the Oracle database truly works. For those new to Oracle, this all-in-one guide provides an essential introduction that will get them up to speed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #218348 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 386 pages

About the Author
Rick Greenwald has been active in the world of computer software for nearly two decades, including stints with Data General, Cognos, and Gupta. He is currently an analyst with Oracle Corporation. He has published six books and countless articles on a variety of technical topics, and has spoken at conferences and training sessions across six continents.

Robert Stackowiak is Senior Director of E-Business Intelligence for Oracle Corporation's Enterprise Technology Center. He works with Oracle's largest customers in North America, providing insight into the company's products and data warehousing strategy. In addition, he frequently assists Oracle Corporate in developing product strategy and training. Articles written by Bob have appeared in publications including The Journal of Data Warehousing, Informix Tech Notes, and AIXcellence Magazine.

Jonathan Stern has more than 13 years of IT experience, including senior positions in consulting, systems architecture, and technical sales. He has authored papers and presented at internal and external conferences on topics such as scaling with Oracle's dynamic parallelism and the role of reorganizing segments in an Oracle database. He is the Technical Director at Ariba, Inc., the leading vendor of value chain solutions for electronic commerce.

Excerpted from Oracle Essentials: Oracle10g by Rick Greenwald, Robert Stackowiak, Jonathan Stern. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1 - Introducing Oracle

Where do we start? One of the problems in comprehending a massive product such as the Oracle database is the difficulty of getting a good sense of how the product works without getting lost in the details of implementing specific solutions. This book aims to solve this problem by giving you a thorough grounding in the concepts and technologies that form the foundation of the Oracle Database Server. Oracle also provides an Application Server and business applications, including the E-Business Suite and the Oracle Collaboration Suite,* which are outside the scope of the main body of this book.

We’ve tried to write a book for a wide range of Oracle users, from the novice to the experienced user. To address this range of users, we’ve focused on the concepts and technology behind the Oracle database. Once you fully understand these facets of the product, you’ll be able to handle the particulars of virtually any type of Oracle database. Without this understanding, you may feel overburdened as you try to connect the dots of Oracle’s voluminous feature set and documentation.

This first chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the discussions in this book. Of all the chapters, it covers the broadest range of topics; most of these are discussed further later in the book, but some of the basics—for example, the brief history of Oracle and the contents of the different "flavors" of the Oracle database products - are unique to this chapter.

* Previous versions of this book did cover iFS. In Oracle Database 10g, however, this product is now known as Oracle Files and is now a part of the Oracle Collaboration Suite. For this reason, iFS is not covered in this edition.

Oracle has grown from its humble beginnings as one of a number of databases available in the 1970s to the market leader of today. In its early days, Oracle Corporation was known more as an aggressive sales and promotion organization than a technology supplier. Over the years, the Oracle database has grown in depth and quality, and its technical capabilities now are generally recognized as the most advanced. With each release, Oracle has added more power and features to its already solid base while improving the manageability.

Several recent Oracle database releases are the focus of this book:

Oracle8i
Oracle8i, released in 1999, added a new twist to the Oracle database—a combination of enhancements that made the Oracle8i database the focal point of the world of Internet (the i in 8i) computing.

Oracle9i
Oracle9i, released in 2001, introduced Real Application Clusters as a replacement for Oracle Parallel Server, and added many management and data warehousing features.

Oracle Database 10g
Oracle Database 10g, released in 2003 and the current release, enables grid (the g in 10g) computing. A grid is simply a pool of computers that provides needed resources for applications on an as-needed basis. The goal is to provide computing resources that transparently scale to the user community, much as an electrical utility company can deliver power to meet peak demand by accessing energy from other power providers’ plants via a power grid. Oracle Database 10g further reduces the time, cost, and complexity of database management through the introduction of self-managing features such as the Automated Database Diagnostic Monitor, Automated Shared Memory Tuning, Automated Storage Management, and Automated Disk Based Backup and Recovery. One important key to Oracle Database 10g’s usefulness in grid computing is the ability to provision CPUs and data.

Before we dive into the specific foundations of these releases, we must spend a little time describing some Oracle basics—how databases evolved to arrive at the relational model, a brief history of Oracle Corporation, and an introduction to the basic features and configurations of the database.

The Evolution of the Relational Database
The relational database concept was described first by Dr. Edgar F. Codd in an IBM research publication entitled "System R4 Relational" appearing in 1970. Initially, it was unclear whether any system based on this concept could achieve commercial success. Nevertheless, Relational Software, Incorporated (RSI) began in 1977 and released Oracle V.2 as the world’s first relational database within a couple of years. By 1985, Oracle could claim more than 1,000 relational database customer sites. By comparison, IBM would not embrace relational technology in a commercial product until the Query Management Facility in 1983.

Customer Reviews

oracle primer
Usefull as an intro. Would be better if they concentrated on one release and stuck to the basics rather than covering all the functionality in Oracle. Too much ground is covered in too little detail.

Excelent introduction
I started reading this book with certain expectations. I work daily with Oracle so I always felt the need to know more about certain aspects of the database itself and the way things work in the background. This book started a bit disappointing, because the initial chapters seem like a shopping list of features, stating thoroughly all the features that are available with this version of Oracle (that's the reason of only four stars).

However, past that initial and overly long listing, the book becomes very interesting and, more importantly, goes directly to the point. I can't say that I knew much Oracle to start with, so this book helped me in two ways: by explaining the basics of this DBMS and going to the trouble of even to remind me of some basic database concepts. The chapters become more and more complete, as you read, making the reader see Oracle more like an application suite than a dedicated DBMS.

I strongly recommend this book to all those starting to use Oracle, as an excellent introduction to the more simple and complex aspects of this application.

An excelent book for a Unix Admin
This is an excelent book for a Unix Admin that needs a good knowledge of how Oracle works to more efficiently administrate DB Servers on Unix platforms. It covers important topics on performance and high availability that are very helpfull for a Unix Admin