Oracle Essentials

Guide Rating -

Once again, O'Reilly and Associates hit a home run with the publication of Oracle Essentials. This publication fills a long-standing gap in the Oracle database literature. It offers a concise introduction to the full range of Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8's functionality -- something you won't find anywhere else on the shelves of your local bookseller. Most Oracle references are forbidding tomes consisting of over a thousand pages of dreary technical detail that lack a coherent learning path or a decent overview of the Oracle product line. In fact, I know of a student who looked for this type of introduction on the Oracle website and came up empty handed and more confused than when she began. I'll be giving her this book for Christmas (guess I let the cat out of the bag!).

In this work, Greenwald, Stackowiak and Stern managed to pack a complete look at Oracle's functionality into a little over three hundred pages of entertaining, well-written text that will actually fit in your briefcase. Let me preface this review with a caveat -- this book is by no means a technical reference. That said, it provides a solid foundation upon which you can build a great knowledge of Oracle databases. The authors manage to maintain a well-structured approach to the topic at hand and provide a comprehensive list of further resources that can be consulted for in-depth topic coverage. I'm thoroughly convinced that anyone who works with Oracle, from the aspiring novice to the experience DBA, will benefit by setting aside the time it takes to read this book cover-to-cover.

O'Reilly offers a complete table of contents on their website, but here's a list of the book's chapters to provide you with an overview of the topics covered:

Introducing Oracle
Oracle Architecture
Installing and Running Oracle
Data Structures
Managing Oracle
Oracle Performance
Multiuser Concurrency
Oracle and Transaction Processing
Oracle and Data Warehousing
Oracle and High Availability
Oracle and Hardware Architecture
Distributed Databases and Distributed Data
Extending Oracle Datatypes
Oracle and the Web

Notice that the first chapter above is a hyperlink -- O'Reilly provides this chapter as a freebie on their website. If you're not going to purchase the entire book, I heartily recommend giving this chapter a read. It's a fine work on the evolution of relational databases and the Oracle product line.