Advise needed: Can I use/learn Oracle quickly?

Hi group!

This is my situation: I offered a few friends who work in some office (financial department) to help them out. They have to start using a datawarehouse now, but seriously lack basic SQL knowledge, which is a problem because they actually have to check the reliability of that data (Planning & Control devision).

So I offered them to teach them some basics. Just a short hands-on course with some datatypes, tabledesign, prim. keys, foreign keys, etc. Nothing fancy.

They were all very happy, but then the following problem arose: They want me to do it on an Oracle database because all their software runs on that.

The problem is I never worked with Oracle before besides 5 minutes on SQL* years ago.
But I am experienced with databasedesign/usage but not on Oracle.

my background:
PostgeSQL 7.X : I know Postgresql quite well and worked with that for years happily.
M$ SQL Server (7 I think)
MySQL
Access (If you can call that a database) and a few more obscure perl/php libs for flatfile database.

My question (you guessed):
How well equiped I am to teach some basics on SQL when I use Oracle? I heard PostgreSQL is a little similar to Oracle. Is that true? (That would make me happy.)
What do I need to create a few tables?
Is there some visual GUI to Oracle database? (I only know commandline SQL*) What websites are good for a quickstart? Can I download some evaluationversion for free? (I have access to Linux Redhat8 and NT4 and Windows2000 Professional)

I hope somebody can get me ontrack with this.

I know how annoying it can be when somebody drops into a newsgroup with questions like this (happens to me all the time in c.l.java.*), so please forgive me for that. :-)

Thank a lot for your time!

Regards,
Erwin Moller Received on Wed Feb 11 2004 - 09:55:07 CST