Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

About the Second Edition (Oracle9i)

We were pleased that the first edition of this book, which covered the Oracle database up to the Oracle8i version, was well received and that O’Reilly & Associates agreed to publish this second edition. In this update to the original book, we have added information about the latest release of the Oracle database, Oracle9i.

For the most part our task was fairly clear-cut, since the Oracle9i release is primarily incremental—the new features in the release extend existing features of the database. We’ve added the information about these extensions to each of the chapters, wherever this information was most relevant and appropriate.

Note that this second edition does not cover everything that is new in Oracle9i. In general, we followed the same guidelines for this edition that we did for the first edition. If a new feature did not seem to be broadly important, we did not necessarily delve into it; similarly, in the first edition we did not try to produce a laundry list of every characteristic of the Oracle database. In addition, if a feature fell into an area outside the scope of the earlier edition, we did not attempt to cover it in this edition. An example is the set of detailed changes to the SQL language used in Oracle9i; we expect that those features will be amply covered in Oracle documentation and in SQL-specific books.

Appendix A includes a chapter-by-chapter summary of the new features of Oracle9i that are described in this book.