Oracle Essentials

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. In addition to Oracle Essentials, Rick's books include Oracle Power Objects Developer's Guide (principal author with Kasu Sista and Richard Finklestein, Oracle Press, 1995); Mastering Oracle Power Objects (principal author with Robert Hoskins, O'Reilly & Associates, 1996); Using Oracle Web Server (principal author with many others, Que Publishing, 1997); The Oracle WebDB Bible (principal author with Jim Milbery, IDG Books Worldwide, 1999); and Administering Exchange Server (principal author with Walter Glenn, Microsoft Press, 1999). 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. Prior to joining Oracle in 1996, Robert was the Decision Support Segment Manager in IBM's RISC System/6000 Division. There, he met with IBM's largest customers throughout North America who were implementing RS/6000s and the IBM RS/6000 SP. He also previously worked as a Senior Field Analyst at Harris Computer Systems and as Chief of Programming at the St. Paul District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 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 in-depth experience with the Oracle RDBMS across all major open systems hardware and operating systems, covering tuning, scaling and parallelism, Oracle Parallel Server, high availability, data warehousing, OLTP, object-relational databases, N-tier architectures, and emerging trends such as Java and CORBA. 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. Jonathan is the Technical Director at Ariba, Inc., the leading vendor of value chain solutions for electronic commerce. Previously, he led a team of highly experienced database specialists at Oracle Corporation, providing technical depth and strategic assistance to Oracle's largest customers in the North Central USA.

Preface. 1. Introducing Oracle The Evolution of the Relational Database The Oracle Family Summary of Oracle Features Database Application Development Features Database Connection Features Distributed Database Features Data Movement Features Performance Features Database Management Features Oracle Internet Developer Suite Oracle Lite. 2. Oracle Architecture Instances and Databases The Components of a Database The Components of an Instance The Data Dictionary. 3. Installing and Running Oracle Installing Oracle Creating a Database Configuring Oracle Net/Net8 Starting Up the Database Shutting Down the Database Accessing a Database Oracle at Work. 4. Data Structures Datatypes Basic Data Structures Additional Data Structures Data Design Constraints Triggers Query Optimization Understanding the Execution Plan Data Dictionary Tables. 5. Managing Oracle Implementing Security Management Through the Oracle Enterprise Manager Options for Oracle Enterprise Manager Fragmentation and Reorganization Backup and Recovery Working with Oracle Support. 6. Oracle Performance Performance Tuning Basics Oracle and Disk I/O Resources Oracle and Parallelism Oracle and Memory Resources Oracle and CPU Resources Avoiding Performance Problems with Oracle9i Real Application Clusters and Performance. 7. Multiuser Concurrency Basics of Concurrent Access Oracle and Concurrent User Access Oracle's Isolation Levels Oracle Concurrency Features How Oracle Handles Locking Concurrent Access and Performance Workspaces. 8. Oracle and Transaction Processing OLTP Basics Oracle's OLTP Heritage Architectures for OLTP Oracle Features for OLTP High Availability Oracle Advanced Queuing Object Technologies and Distributed Components. 9. Oracle and Data Warehousing Data Warehousing Basics Data Warehouse Design Query Optimization OLAP in the Database Managing the Data Warehouse Other Data Warehouse Software The Metadata Challenge Best Practices. 10. Oracle and High Availability What Is High Availability? System Crashes Protecting Against System Crashes Recovering from Disasters Complete Site Failure Data Redundancy Solutions. 11. Oracle and Hardware Architecture System Basics Uniprocessor Systems Symmetric Multiprocessing Systems Clusters Massively Parallel Processing Systems Nonuniform Memory Access Systems Disk Technology Which Hardware Solution? 12. Distributed Databases and Distributed Data Accessing Multiple Databases as a Single Entity Two-Phase Commits Moving Data Between Distributed Systems Advanced Queuing. 13. Extending Oracle Datatypes Object-Oriented Development Extensibility Features and Options Using the Extensibility Framework in Oracle. 14. Oracle and the Web The Internet Computing Platform Oracle as an Internet Server XML Dynamic Services Oracle Internet Application Server Oracle9iAS Portal. A. What's New in This Book for Oracle9i. B. Additional Resources. Index