Introduction

When you're learning any new topic or technology, it's important to have all of the basics at your disposal. The Sybex Foundations series provides the building blocks of specific technologies that help you establish yourself in IT.

So, you want to be an Oracle database administrator (DBA), but you're not sure what the job might be like? Well, this is a good place to start! This book is intended to bridge the gap for people who are technically oriented and need something to bridge the gap to Oracle database administration. If you don't have a lot of direct experience with databases, this book can get you up to speed on enough of the basics to feel comfortable going into more advanced topics and other introductory coursework.

What You Need

Oracle Database Foundations assumes some minimal level of expertise in using an operating system such as Windows or Unix in a graphical user interface (GUI) environment. Any experience with a personal database, such as Microsoft Access, is helpful but not required.

To follow along with the examples in the book, you will need an installation of the Oracle database software version 9.2 or preferably 10g, Standard or Enterprise Edition, including the sample schemas provided by Oracle in the installation package, preferably on a Microsoft Windows platform. However, if you're adept with Linux, then RedHat, SuSE, or other distributions of Linux will work fine, too, as the operating system platform.

What This Book Covers

This book provides all the information you need to understand the job of an Oracle DBA. It is organized as follows:

Chapter 1, "Relational Database Concepts" Covers the basics of relational database technology. It defines terms such as tables, rows, and columns, and it provides an introduction to database design.

Chapter 2, "SQL*Plus and iSQL*Plus Basics" Introduces the various ways to send SQL commands to the database. It explains the tools available for issuing SQL commands and how to interact with the database.

Chapter 3, "Oracle Database Functions" Focuses on Oracle functions, both built-in and user-defined, and how they can make an application developer's or DBA's job easier.

Chapter 4, "Restricting, Sorting, and Grouping Data" Describes how to manage queries by restricting and sorting their results.

wChapter 5, "Using Multiple Tables" Moves from accessing single tables to joining multiple tables in a multitude of ways, with both the old and new join syntax.

Chapter 6, "Advanced SQL Queries" Covers some of the more advanced functions and explains how to nest a query within another query to retrieve the results you want.

Chapter 7, "Logical Consistency" Describes how to make sure that the rows entered into the database tables are accurate and consistent with data in other tables in the database. This chapter discusses how you can validate the data before it is inserted into a row of a table.

Chapter 8, "Installing Oracle and Creating a Database" Shows you how to install the database software on the server and create a database using Oracle's GUI-based tools.

Chapter 9, "Reporting Techniques" Investigates techniques for making reports easier to understand and manage.

Chapter 10, "Creating and Maintaining Database Objects" Explores the different ways to create tables, indexes, views, sequences, and synonyms. It also describes how to use data dictionary views and dynamic performance views.

Chapter 11, "Users and Security" Focuses on how to prevent unauthorized or unintentional actions in the database. It covers how to create user accounts, grant and revoke privileges, and keep tabs on who is accessing what kind of object and when.

Chapter 12, "Making Things Run Fast (Enough)" Explores techniques for tuning the database so it will respond to queries as quickly as possible. This chapter covers how the Oracle optimizer works and how you can use indexes judiciously to make queries run in a reasonable amount of time.

Chapter 13, "Saving Your Stuff (Backups)" Describes how, by using the right combination of backup and recovery techniques, the DBA can minimize or even eliminate the possibility of losing any committed data in the database.

Chapter 14, "Troubleshooting" Reviews some of the places to look for error messages, along with some general troubleshooting techniques.

Making the Most of This Book

At the beginning of each chapter of Oracle Database Foundations, you'll find a list of topics that you can expect to learn about within that chapter.

To help you absorb new material easily, I've highlighted important terms and defined them in the margins of the pages. You'll also find three kinds of notes with supplementary material:

Tips are insights that help you perform tasks more easily and effectively.

Warnings let you know about things you should do—or shouldn't do—as you learn more about what an Oracle DBA's job is like.

At the end of each chapter, you can test your knowledge of the topics covered by answering the chapter's review questions. At the end of the book is a glossary of all the terms that have been introduced throughout the book. You'll find the answers to the review questions in Appendix A. Appendix B contains a brief overview of other database platforms and how they might fit into an enterprise's database infrastructure.

About the Author

Bob Bryla is an Oracle8i, Oracle9i, and Oracle 10g certified professional (OCP) with more than 15 years of database design, database application development, and database administration experience in a variety of fields. He is currently an Internet database analyst and DBA at Lands' End, Inc., in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. You can contact Bob by e-mail at [email protected].