Re: Learn Oracle in three days?

"Michael Wilkinson" <mwilkinson_jr_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:5d7c58cb.0205121625.3acf40c3_at_posting.google.com...
> Greetings - masters of table extents, and other things arcane. This
> neophyte has a ludicrous question for you: Is it possible for me to
> learn oracle in three days or less? I've worked with other RDBMS in
> the past, and know the difference between a fragment and a chunk,
but
> my first pass through the oracle documentation had convinced me that
I
> might have just entered into seventh circle of hell.

Like all things, it depends. <g>

If your background is hard core databases (theory and practical) and you have a set of DBA student guides from Oracle, I think in three days you can make a lot of headway. Will you understand some of the nuances? Nah, but is it critical? Not initially.

If you're wondering what I believe a hard core database person to know, here are some sample questions:

• Do you understand the concept of dense versus non-dense indexes?
• Do you understand why databases have a 'data' portion and a 'log' portion?
• Do you understand why the need for checkpointing?
• Do you understand what happens on a DBMS failure and its recovery from the log perspective?
• Do you know how piggybacking off of an index can help you? (also known as a 'covered query')
• Do you know the I/O characteristics of the:
  • log
  • data

(these kinda just came quickly)

As for extents, segments and tablespaces, I find these to be one of the nice things about Oracle. Perhaps you were being flippant but to be able to micro-manage where my data resides on disk and on which disks is extremely important to me for performance reasons.

If the above is a bit for you, I'd take a DBA class ASAP. Some mangler really did a poor job scheduling the launch of the app.

Have fun!

--
Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering
mailto:pablo_at_hpdbe.com
http://www.hpdbe.com
Available for short-term and long-term contracts