Oracle SQL*Plus: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Creating and Loading the Sample Tables

Many of the examples in this book, particularly the reporting examples, have been developed against an example database for an employee time-tracking system. It's a fairly simplistic database, containing only three tables, but it's enough to illustrate everything I talk about in this book. You may or may not wish to create this database for yourself. Creating the database will allow you to try all the examples in this book exactly as they are shown. If you choose not to create and load the sample database, at least familiarize yourself with the data model. Glance at the sample data, which are reproduced later in this section. If you have looked at the model and at the data, you shouldn't have any trouble following and understanding the examples in this book.

Tip

Every numbered example in this book is provided in a set of example scripts that you can download from the catalog page for this book at http://oreilly.com/catalog/orsqlplus2. Example 1-1 is in the file named ex1-1.sql, Example 1-2 is in the file named ex1-2.sql, and so forth.

The Data Model

Figure 1-3 shows an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for the sample database.

Figure 1-3. The sample database

As you can see from the ERD, there are only three entities: EMPLOYEE, PROJECT, and PROJECT_HOURS. Table 1-2 gives a brief description of each entity.

Table 1-2. Entity descriptions

Entity name ...