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.
Chapter 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.
