First of all, I would like to thank my wife and my sons for letting me steal evenings and week-ends, from them for almost two years, not sure I will ever make up for this time.

My special thanks to my friends Herve Lejeune and Soulaiman Htite for their moral support throughout the whole process and for putting up with my eternal excuse, the book, for not getting together.

I would like to thank numerous friends and colleagues, notably Barbara Krag, Penny Avril, Angela Long, Eric Belden, Shandra Cheevers, Jyotsna Laxminarayanan, Vladimir Barriere, Bojana Simova, Matthieu Devin, and Agnes Devin who have morally helped by persistently asking “How’s the book?” you cannot imagine how supportive this simple question can be.

Without the backing of publishers there won’t be so many books out there as you may not have the opportunity to publish and it will be more tempting to just give up when you are stuck in front of your computer, with no inspiration (i.e., the blank page syndrome). I would like to thank, a million time, Sheila Cepero for liaising me with Theron R.Shreve, my publisher – a gentle man, who trusted me based on the draft outline of the book.

But the gist, the technical content in this book would not have been possible without the active contribution, and/or technical support, and/or advice, of numerous developers and engineers inside and outside Oracle. In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to, in disorder: Robert H. Lee, Allison Lee-Waingold, Malik Kalfane, David Unietis, Mark. Jungerman, Dmitry Nizhegorodov, Ernest Tucker, Peter Benson, Srivatsan Govindarajan, Yimin Huang, Paul Lo, Douglas Surber, Edward Shirk, Jean de Lavarene, Rajkumar Irudayaraj, Tong Zhou, Ashok Shivarudraiah, Soulaiman Htite, Steve Ding, Ekkehard Rohwedder, Eric Rajkovic, Omar Alonzo, Quan Wang, Mehul Bastawala, Lakshminaray Chidambaran, Harlan Sexton, Gregory Colvin, Xuhua Li, Susan Mavris, Andrew Lamb, Amit Bande, Ali Shehadeh, Mark Scardina, Michael Alshouse, Venkatasubramaniam Iyer, Troy Anthony, Marcello Ochoa, Francisco Juarez, Esteban Capoccetti, Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert, and many others that I am sure I have missed (in advance, my sincere apologies).

The content would not be accurate or intelligible without technical reviewers who have the hard task of “parsing” raw materials from the author. I am very grateful to Avi Abrami, Oracle ACE and very popular on the Oracle OTN forums for his deep review of Part I; my special gratitude to the discrete but efficient Quan Wang for reviewing the entire book as well as contributing to its content.

I am blessed and honored that Tom Kyte, in spite of his busy agenda and numerous engagements, accepted to go over the entire book while it was in hard to read state (i.e., not proof read), and eventually wrote the foreword. Tom is one of the most passionate and knowledgeable person about the Oracle database and its components that I know.

Finally, to turn my Word documents into this book that you are holding in your hands, it took the dedication of an entire production team. I would like to express my gratitude to the Elsevier editorial and production teams for working hard to compensate my retard in delivery the manuscript (my day job is a good excuse, though!): Alan Rose, Tim Donar, the administrative staff, the marketing staff and the anonymous behind-the-scene workers.