Re: Newbie

From: Allan Hicks <allan.hicks_at_acsatlanta.com>
Date: 1997/06/10
Message-ID: <339D5079.279A@acsatlanta.com>#1/1

Ed King wrote:
>
> A proprietary database has been installed at work and I'm clueless.
> What is the best way to learn about databases in general and oracle/sql?
> I would like to learn to make queries of the database and not rely on
> the canned reports provided by the contractor. My access to the
> database is from Win95 and I think it has the ODBC? drivers(through
> Access). Are there any books that would be helpful?
>
> I'd appreciate any ideas and no, getting the contractor to write better
> reports is not an option.

I've enjoyed Oracle PL/SQL Programming by Steven Feuerstein published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. It is a good book for not only understanding PL/SQL, but also for learning some good coding techniques. Most of the Oracle tools rely upon PL/SQL and so this makes a good foundation. O'Reilly has another book, Advanced PL/SQL Programming. I haven't had time to check it out. The Server Concepts manual that came with my system was also good.

Oracle Reports 2.5 and Oracle Forms 4.5 are good tools. If you're on a PC, you probably have Forms 5.0 or better. I haven't looked at many forms books, but Developing Oracle Forms Applications by Lulushi published by Prentice Hall has been helpful.

Oracle Forms is ugly on HP-UX. If you have the budget, PowerBuilder by Powersoft (now owned by Sybase) looks like a really slick tool. I have some concern about how much support Powersoft will give the Oracle ODBC drivers in the future, but I'm just paranoid.

Proprietary is usually a contractor word for undocumented. If you're out to wander around the database to see what's out there, the most value table that there is is called USER_TABLES. If you  

select table_name from user_tables;

You can get a good lay of the land. The desc tablename command will provide you with the table structure.

Example:

desc foo

foo

---

columna varchar(30)
columnb number

I hope that this helped.

-Allan Received on Tue Jun 10 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT