Oracle Essentials Oracle Database 11g (2 page)

Accessing Multiple Databases As a Single Entity

305

Moving Data Between Distributed Systems

310

14. Oracle Extended Datatypes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
318

Object-Oriented Development

318

Extensibility Features and Options

324

Using the Extensibility Framework in Oracle

329

15. Beyond the Oracle Database
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
331

Application Express

331

Oracle Fusion Middleware

332

Oracle SOA Suite

345

A. What’s New in This Book for Oracle Database 11g
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
349

B. Additional Resources
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
356

Index
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
365

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Table of Contents

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Preface1

We dedicate this book to the memory of one of our original coauthors, Jonathan Stern. Jonathan unexpectedly passed away in March of 2007. Yet his memory lives on for those of us who knew him and, in many ways, for those who will read this book. Let us explain.

The original outline for this book was first assembled at the ubiquitous coffee shop located in the Sears Tower in Chicago. It was 1998 and the authors had gathered there with a common goal. We were all Oracle employees working in technical sales roles and had visited many organizations and companies. We found that many IT

managers, Oracle database administrators (DBAs), and Oracle developers were quite adept at reading Oracle’s documentation, but seemed to be missing an understanding of the overall Oracle footprint and how to practically apply what they were reading. It was as if they had a recipe book, but were unclear on how to gather the right ingredients and mix them together successfully. This bothered all of us, but it particularly frustrated Jonathan.

Jonathan was the kind of person who sought to understand how things worked.

Nothing delighted Jonathan more than gaining such an understanding, then spending hours thinking of ways to translate his understanding into something that would be more meaningful to others. He believed that a key role for himself while at Oracle was the transfer of such knowledge to others. He continued to perform similar roles later at other companies at which he worked.

Writing the first edition of
Oracle Essentials
was a lengthy process. Jonathan wrote several of the original chapters, and he also reviewed some of the other original work and was quick to identify where he thought something was wrong. For Jonathan,

“wrong” meant that the text could be misinterpreted and that further clarity was needed to make sure the right conclusion was drawn. The first edition became much more useful through Jonathan’s efforts. He was always quite proud of that effort.

Even as the book changed with succeeding editions and Jonathan moved on to other companies, he continued to feel that this book remained an important accomplish-ment in his life.

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Some explanations of how Oracle works are fundamental to the database and have not changed in subsequent editions of the book, so some of Jonathan’s original work remains here, although much of the surrounding text is now considerably different.

Of course, some entire sections describing the complex steps that were once needed to manage and deploy older releases of the database are no longer relevant and thus are no longer included. Jonathan would probably view Oracle’s self-managing and self-tuning improvements as incredible achievements, but would also wonder whether it is a good thing that people can know even less today about how the database works but still deploy it.

So, we introduce you to the fourth edition of
Oracle Essentials
. We have made many changes in this edition. Some, of course, result from changes in features in Oracle Database 11
g
and the ways that youcan now use and deploy the latest release of the database. But we have also made a considerable effort to go back and rewrite parts of the book that we did not believe possessed the clarity needed by our readers—clarity that Jonathan would want in such a book. So, he influences us still.

Goals of This Book

Our main goal is to give you a foundation for using the Oracle database effectively and efficiently. Therefore, we wrote with these principles in mind:
Focus

We’ve tried to concentrate on the most important Oracle issues. Every topic provides a comprehensive but concise discussion of how Oracle handles an issue and the repercussions of that action.

Brevity

One of the first decisions we made was to concentrate on principles rather than syntax. There simply isn’t room for myriad syntax diagrams and examples in this book.

Uniqueness

We’ve tried to make this an ideal first Oracle book for a wide spectrum of Oracle users—but not the last! You will very likely have to refer to Oracle documentation or other, more specific books for more details about using Oracle. However, we hope this book will act as an accelerator for you. Using the foundation you get from this book, youcan take detailed information from other sources and put it to the best use.

This book is the result of more than 45 combined years of experience with Oracle and other databases. We hope you’ll benefit from that experience.

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Preface

Audience for This Book

We wrote this book for people possessing all levels of Oracle expertise. Our target audiences include DBAs who spend most of their workday managing Oracle, application developers who build their systems on the data available in an Oracle database, and system administrators who are concerned with how Oracle will affect their computing environments. Of course, IT managers and business users interact more peripherally with the actual Oracle product. On the one hand, anticipating the appropriate technical level of all our potential readers presented difficulties; on the other hand, we’ve tried to build a solid foundation from the ground up and believe that some introductory material benefits everyone. We’ve also tried to ensure that every reader receives all the fundamental information necessary to truly understand the topics presented.

If you’re an experienced Oracle user, you may be tempted to skip over material in this book with which youare already familiar. But experience has shown that some of the most basic Oracle principles can be overlooked, even by experts. We’ve also seen how the same small “gotchas” trip up even the most experienced Oracle practitioners and cause immense damage if they go unnoticed. After all, an ounce of prevention, tempered by understanding, is worth a pound of cure, especially when you are trying to keep your systems running optimally. So we hope that even experienced Oracle users will find valuable information in every chapter of this book—

information that will save hours in their busy professional lives.

Our guiding principle has been to present this information compactly without making it overly tutorial. We think that the most important ratio in a book like this is the amount of useful information you get balanced against the time it takes you to get it.

We sincerely hope this volume provides a terrific bang for the buck.

About the Fourth Edition (Oracle Database 11g)

The first three editions of this book, covering the Oracle database up to the Oracle Database 10
g
version, have been well received, and we were pleased that O’Reilly Media agreed to publish this fourth edition. In this update to the book, we have added information describing the latest release of Oracle, Oracle Database 11
g
.

For the most part, the task of preparing this fourth edition was fairly clear-cut, because the Oracle Database 11
g
release is primarily incremental—the new features in the release extend existing features of the database. We’ve added the information about these extensions to each of the chapters, wherever this information was most relevant and appropriate. However, manageability has greatly changed over the release, and is reflected in many of the most significant changes to content.

Preface

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Of course, this fourth edition cannot possibly cover everything that is new in Oracle Database 11
g
. In general, we have followed the same guidelines for this edition that we did for the first three editions. If a new feature does not seem to be broadly important, we have not necessarily delved into it. As with earlier editions we have not tried to produce a laundry list of every characteristic of the Oracle database. In addition, if a feature falls into an area outside the scope of the earlier editions, we have not attempted to cover it in this edition unless it has assumed new importance.

Structure of This Book

This book is divided into 15 chapters and 2 appendixes, as follows:

Chapter 1,
Introducing Oracle
,
describes the range of Oracle products and features and provides a brief history of Oracle and relational databases.

Chapter 2,
Oracle Architecture
, describes the core concepts and structures (e.g., files, processes, and so on) that are the architectural basis of Oracle.

Chapter 3,
Installing and Running Oracle
,
briefly describes how to install Oracle and how to configure, start up, and shut down the database and Oracle Net.

Chapter 4,
Oracle Data Structures
,
summarizes the various datatypes supported by Oracle and introduces the Oracle objects (e.g., tables, views, indexes). This chapter also covers query optimization.

Chapter 5,
Managing Oracle
, provides an overview of managing an Oracle system, including the advisors available as part of Oracle Database 11
g
, using Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM), dealing with database fragmentation and reorganization using current database releases, information lifecycle management, and working with Oracle Support.

Chapter 6,
Oracle Security, Auditing, and Compliance
, provides an overview of basic Oracle security, Oracle’s security options, basic auditing capabilities, and ways you can leverage the Oracle Database Vault Option and the Audit Vault Server to meet compliance needs.

Chapter 7,
Oracle Performance
, describes the main issues relevant to Oracle performance—especially the major performance characteristics of disk, memory, and CPU

tuning. It describes how Oracle Enterprise Manager, the Automatic Workload Repository, and the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor are used for performance monitoring and management, as well as parallelism and memory management in Oracle.

Chapter 8,
Oracle Multiuser Concurrency
, describes the basic principles of multiuser concurrency (e.g., transactions, locks, integrity problems) and explains how Oracle handles concurrency.

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Preface

Chapter 9,
Oracle and Transaction Processing
, describes online transaction processing (OLTP) in Oracle.

Chapter 10,
Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
,
describes the basic principles of data warehouses and business intelligence, Oracle database features used for such solutions, Oracle’s business intelligence tools, relevant options such as OLAP and Data Mining, and best practices.

Chapter 11,
Oracle and HighAvailability
, discusses availability concepts, what happens when the Oracle database recovers, protecting against system failure, Oracle’s backup and recovery facilities, and high availability and failover solutions.

Chapter 12,
Oracle and Hardware Architecture
,
describes your choice of computer architectures, configuration considerations, and deployment strategies for Oracle, including grid computing.

Chapter 13,
Oracle Distributed Databases and Distributed Data
,
briefly summarizes the Oracle facilities used in distributed processing including two-phase commits and Streams Advanced Queuing and replication.

Chapter 14,
Oracle Extended Datatypes
, describes Oracle’s object-oriented features, Java’s™ role, web services support, multimedia extensions to the Oracle datatypes, content management using the database, spatial capabilities, and the extensibility framework.

Chapter 15,
Beyond the Oracle Database
,
describes Oracle Application Express, deploying to the Web using the Oracle Application Server and Fusion Middleware, and the overall use of Oracle in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment.

Appendix A,
What’s New in This Book for Oracle Database 11g
, lists the Oracle Database 11
g
changes described in this book.

Appendix B,
Additional Resources
, lists a variety of additional resources—both online and offline—so you can do more detailed reading.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic

Used for file and directory names, emphasis, and the first occurrence of terms Constant width

Used for code examples and literals

Constant width italic

In code examples, indicates an element (for example, a parameter) that you supply
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