Preface
Introduced a quarter-century ago, the Oracle database remains the leading enterprise-strength relational database management system (RDBMS) in the world. Oracle is a complex system, offering a myriad of products, languages, and tools. Frequent updates, releases, and editions complicate the ability of Oracle users to keep up with the huge amount of frequently changing information about Oracle. A large number of books, articles, and web sites endeavor to clarify a confusing and demanding situation. Is there really a need for yet another book?
The goal of Oracle in a Nutshell is to provide just what you need to know about Oracle in a volume whose content and format combine to put necessary information at your fingertips. This book is a quick reference for the commands and parameters used with Oracle’s core languages and tools. In this book, we’ve tried to pull together, in the most concise fashion possible, the information that database administrators and developers need as they manage Oracle databases and write code for these databases.
As with other books in O’Reilly’s “In a Nutshell” series, this book is geared toward users who know what they want to do, but just can’t remember the right command or default, the right parameter or range of values, or the right package header format and datatypes. We generally assume that you are already at least somewhat familiar with the languages and tools described here. For tutorials, detailed discussions of usage, and subtle details, you ...