Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 2SQL and PL/SQL

A number of our established "powerful" programming language features, even beloved ones, could very well turn out to belong rather to "the problem set" than to "the solution set."

—Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, advocate of structuredprogramming and winner of the 1972 Turing Award, in "CorrectnessConcerns and, Among Other Things, Why They Are Resented"

All database activity is conducted in SQL, and therefore database administrators need to be intimately familiar with it. Figure 2-1 illustrates that the greatest potential for performance improvement usually lies within the software application, not within the database where the application stores its data or within the physical infrastructure where the database ...