Discovering SQL: A Hands-On Guide for Beginners

ORACLE 10G XE

We are using Oracle 10g in this book because this is the latest Oracle Express edition freely available at the time of this writing; the latest commercial release is Oracle 11g. There is no difference in functionality within the scope of this book, and the installation process described here will be identical between these versions.

Installing Library Sample Database with SQL*Plus

1. Launch Oracle's SQL*Plus utility; Figure A-1 shows the Windows XP menu location.

   

   FIGURE A-1

2. At the SQL prompt, type the following statement: @C:\discovery\DiscoveringSQL.Oracle.Library.sql. As shown in Figure A-2, @ instructs SQL*Plus to load and execute scripts contained in the file.

   

   FIGURE A-2

3. Figure A-3 shows successful execution of the DDL script and the syntax to load yet another script to populate tables with data.

   

   FIGURE A-3

4. Load data into the newly created tables by executing the DiscoveringSQL.Oracle.dat file that contains the INSERT statement. The results are shown in Figure A-4. You can verify that your new Library database tables indeed contain data by executing SELECT statements against them (BOOKS, AUTHORS, and so on; see the database model in Chapter 2 of the book).

   FIGURE ...