Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we thank Darryl Hurley who wrote two chapters of this book: Chapter 2, Cursors, and Chapter 3, Table Functions. He stepped in at a critical moment in the development of the book, assumed significant responsibilities, and produced outstanding content. This text is far stronger for his involvement. Bryn Llewellyn, Oracle’s PL/SQL Product Manager, provided crucial information on Oracle Database 10g’s new features and answered many questions about various PL/SQL features.

We had a lot of help from our technical reviewers, especially because we asked them to test each code snippet and program in the book to keep to an absolute minimum the number of errors that made it into the printed version. We are deeply grateful to the following men and women of the Oracle PL/SQL world, who took time away from the rest of their lives to help make Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs the best book it could be. Jeffrey Hunter carefully reviewed all four security-related chapters under tight time pressure, and we are very grateful to him for his input. Daniel Wong provided key input on the security chapters as well. Many thanks to our chapter reviewers: John Beresniewicz, Dwayne King, Steve Jackson, Lorraine Pocklington, Mahraj Madala, Sean O’Keefe, and Yu-Ho Sikora.

Once we felt good about the technical content, it was time for the remarkable crew at O’Reilly Media, led by our good friend, Deborah Russell, to transform our many chapters and code examples into a book worthy of the O’Reilly imprint. Many thanks to Darren Kelly, production manager for the book; Rob Romano, who created the excellent figures; and the rest of the crew.

Finally, Arup thanks his wife, Anindita, and his son, Anish, who sacrificed precious family time to bring this book to fruition, especially Anish who was too young to verbalize his complaint but missed his father’s playing with him terribly.

Steven thanks his wife, Veva Silva, and two sons, Chris Silva and Eli Silva Feuerstein, for their support and tolerance of the diversion of so much of his time and attention.