The Oracle database is the most popular database in the world, by far eclipsing its closest competitors. Oracle Corporation has achieved this enviable position by providing a product that, to borrow from one of Oracle’s old marketing themes, is compatible, scalable, and portable. In addition, it is capable of performing incredibly fast. The advantages Oracle holds over its competition come with a price, however—the Oracle database is a very complex product, and is becoming more so with every release. As a result, database administration has become critical, and the database administrator (DBA) has become key to the successful implementation of Oracle.

Oracle Database Administration: The Essential Reference was written by Oracle database administrators for Oracle database administrators. If you are an Oracle DBA, or are thinking about becoming one, this book is definitely for you. This book is designed for reference; it is intentionally presented in a terse, to-the-point format. Since we assume that most of the information presented is already somewhat familiar to the working DBA, we provide this information in a location and format that allows you to access it quickly, as required. If you want clear, concise information about Oracle database administration, and plenty of summary tables and quick references to syntax and usage, you have come to the right place. However, if you are just learning database administration, and you want a tutorial that will teach you about the topic from start to finish, you will probably need to begin with an introductory text. Similarly, if you are a programmer, developer, webmaster, or manager, you will find much useful information in this book, but if you don’t know anything about database administration, you might want to begin with something more introductory.

We don’t mean to deter you from buying or reading this book! We simply want you to know up front that our approach here is to cram as much concise and fast-moving material as possible into these pages.