This book is divided into fourteen chapters and two appendixes, as follows.
Chapter 1, briefly describes the range of Oracle products and provides some history of Oracle and relational databases.
Chapter 2, describes the core concepts and structures (e.g., files, processes, and so on) that are the architectural basis of Oracle8.
Chapter 3, brieflydescribes how to install Oracle and how to configure, start up, and shut down the database. It also covers a variety of networking issues.
Chapter 4, summarizes the various datatypes supported by Oracle and introduces the Oracle objects (e.g., tables, views, indexes). It also provides information about query optimization.
Chapter 5, provides an overview of issues involved in managing an Oracle system, including security, using the Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) product, and dealing with database fragmentation and reorganization issues.
Chapter 6, describes the main issues relevant to Oracle performance—especially the major performance characteristics of disk, memory, and CPU tuning—and pays special attention to parallelism in Oracle.
Chapter 7, describes the basic principles of multiuser concurrency (e.g., transactions, locks, integrity problems) and explains how Oracle handles concurrency.
Chapter 8, describes online transaction processing (OLTP) in Oracle.
Chapter 9, describes the basic principles of data warehouses and data marts and how you can use Oracle to build such systems.
Chapter 10, discusses Oracle’s backup and recovery facilities, including the latest failover and data-redundancy solutions.
Chapter 11, describes how the choice of various types of architectures (e.g., uniprocessor, SMP, MPP, NUMA) affects Oracle processing.
Chapter 12, briefly summarizes the Oracle facilities used in distributed processing—for example, two-phase commits and Advanced Queuing.
Chapter 13, discusses how Oracle8 and Oracle8i provide object-oriented extensions to Oracle datatypes and to the overall processing framework.
Chapter 14, describes how Oracle is now being used as an Internet computing platform and introduces various web-related tools, such as Oracle Internet Application Server, Oracle Portal, and Java.
Appendix A, lists the Oracle9i extensions described in this book.
Appendix B, lists a variety of additional resources—both online and offline—so you can do more detailed reading.
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