You can treat Oracle as a black box and just stick data into it or you can understand how it works and exploit it as a powerful computing environment. If you choose the latter course, then you will find that there are few information management problems that you cannot solve quickly and elegantly. What does this book cover? Core database structures and utilities, Performance tuning, Advanced SQL features, Extensibility using C, Java and OR features, Security Important supplied packages etc.

Oracle introduced powerful queuing mechanisms where messages can be exchanged between different programs. They called it Advanced Queuing AQ. Exchanging messages and communicating between different application modules is a key functionally becoming important as soon as we leave the database servers SQL and PL/SQL programming domain. If we have to do different jobs simultaneously, for instance to communicate with external systems and evaluate complex queries at the same time, it might be a design decision to uncouple "request for service" and "supply for service". In one case an application module deals with all external systems and requests a certain query by posting a message on a queue. In the other case an application gets the message, performs the query and supplies the result back on the queue in between.

Optimisation is the process of choosing the most efficient way to execute a SQL statement. The cost-based optimiser uses statistics to calculate the selectivity of predicates and to estimate the cost of each execution plan. You must gather statistics on a regular basis to provide the optimiser with information about schema objects. New statistics should be gathered after a schema object's data or structure are modified in ways that make the previous statistics inaccurate.

With the exception of some read-only applications, it is my contention that building a wholly database-independent application that is highly scalable is extremely hard — and is in fact quite impossible unless you know exactly how each database works in great detail. Book for database independence, the impact of standards, features and functions, and solving problems simply.

Everyone is looking for the fast = true switch, assuming 'database tuning' means that you tune the database. In fact, it is my experience that more than 80 percent (frequently much more, 100 percent) of all performance gains are to be realized at the application level — not the database level. You cannot tune a database until you have tuned the applications that run on the data.

The second installment covers understanding Oracle architecture, using bind variables, understanding concurrency control, and multi-versioning. The people responsible for the architecture understood Java, EJBs, the protocols involved — all of that stuff. They felt they were in a strong position to successfully build such a project. When their application would not scale beyond a couple of users they decided that the database was at fault and severely doubted Oracle's claim to be the 'most scaleable database ever'.

When installing Oracle 8i, if you choose to create your database manually, the UTL_TCP suite of Java classes aren't installed causing all UTL_TCP type procedure calls to fail. This is an explanation on how to manually add the classes.

Article explaining how to install Oracle 8 and 8EE on Linux FreeBSD - includes FreeBSD kernel optimization parameters

A collection of 17 FAQs to introduce PL/SQL language for DBA and developers. This FAQ can also be used as learning tutorials on creating procedures, executing procedures, using local variables, controlling execution flows, passing parameters and defining nested procedures.

This is a collection of FAQ for Oracle DBA on Oracle 10g Express Edition with installation and basic introduction. The clear answers and sample scripts provided can be used as learning tutorials or interview preparation guides.