Oracle Database Administration: The Essential Refe

Why We Wrote This Book

Database administration is a set of tasks, and a database administrator is a highly skilled individual who is responsible for performing those tasks under a variety of conditions. The DBA needs access to a large amount of information about Oracle in order to perform those tasks efficiently and correctly.

Years ago, when Oracle was a somewhat less complex product, those of us who worked as DBAs were able to read manuals, take training courses, and attend user conferences, and thereby learn everything we needed to know about Oracle. Back in those days, if you needed to look at a manual, you couldn’t be a “real” DBA. Obviously, things have changed. It is no longer possible for any individual to learn all there is to know about Oracle. Even if it were possible, the product is advancing so fast that all that accumulated knowledge would soon be out of date anyway!

Today, it’s necessary for the DBA to have a high degree of understanding about the Oracle database, and to have a huge amount of information available when it is needed. Unfortunately, most of this information is available only in the Oracle manuals, and there are at least two impediments to accessing that information in a timely and efficient manner:

• Oracle manuals are organized strictly by topic structure. As a result, you usually need two or three different manuals to get all the information you need about a specific DBA task. It is very difficult to find the right sections of the right manuals—especially when you are under pressure.

• Unless you (or your employer) are willing to spend a lot of extra money, Oracle manuals are now available only electronically (on CD-ROM, or they may be viewed or downloaded from Metalink, Oracle’s online support service, at http://www.oracle.com/support). This makes them difficult to use, especially when you need to access multiple manuals simultaneously. If you are like us, you want your information in front of you on old-fashioned paper.

We decided to write this book because we saw a real need for having all the important day-to-day information a DBA needs in a clear, concise form, logically organized in a single volume. Our goal is not to replace the Oracle manuals. In fact, there is a tremendous amount of information in the Oracle manual set that cannot be duplicated here. There will probably be many occasions where the basic information you need is found in our book, but you will still want to refer to the appropriate Oracle manual for some more detailed information.

As we worked on the book, it became clear to both of us that this was a much larger task then we had ever suspected; in fact, there were times when we doubted it could be done at all. The original plan for this book called for about three hundred pages, and as you can see, we’ve gone on a bit longer than that! A lot of time and effort was expended researching the information provided, and attempting to distill a huge amount of information into a volume of manageable size that, in the end, would be useful to you, the working Oracle DBA. We’ve drawn on our combined twenty-five-plus years of DBA experience in this attempt to save you time, make your job easier, and maybe even avert a potential disaster. We’ve tried to provide you with the details, while keeping the big picture in focus. We hope we have succeeded in this task. Let us know what you think!