Re: Reading books recommended for Oracle beginner

In article <81uo1h$2s2$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>,   afx91_at_my-deja.com wrote:
> Can anyone suggest a good book for someone who is just starting out in
> Oracle but has experience in MS SQL and Access....

I've looked over Oracle Essentials (O'Reilly) and found it fairly thorough.

I haven't read it as closely as *Oracle8 Architecture* (Oracle Press), however. This one helpfully goes into a lot of detail about how all the pieces fit together (i.e. paging, redo logs, background processes, commits). Clean prose, well-organized. The only downside of *Oracle 8 Architecture* is that it lists the "new-fangled" features alongside the classic oracle features (i.e. Bitmax indexes with b-tree indexes). To a newcomer, it can be a bit overwhelming ("Do I need a bitmap or a b-t- tree or a clustered index?").

The oracle documentation is fairly good (on the online documentation 8I cd), but I find it hard to read thoroughly the PDF and HTML documentation.

Finally, there are a range of sub-topics here:

-architecture
-pl/sql programming
-database administration
-design

You'll need a bit of everything to be productive.

> question about Oracle.... does it rely exclusively on SQL language or
> does it have a graphical interface for querying ???
>

Check out the freeware version of toad (Tool for Oracle Application Developers). http://www.toadsoft.com/. Toad has both sql-based and "sql-builder" query tools.

> Thanks
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
>

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy. Received on Mon Nov 29 1999 - 16:26:24 CST