Re: Learn Oracle in three days?

"Michael Wilkinson" <mwilkinson_jr_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:5d7c58cb.0205131941.5a26b490_at_posting.google.com...
> Thanks everyone for the responses - As I expected, I seem to have
> gotten everything in the spectrum from "you are doomed" to "it may be
> doable." I'm going to at least make a stab at it, and worse case
> scenario I will end up throwing it back into the project manager's
> face. I've learned more since my last email - The data will be stored
> on a EMC array, so the likelihood of losing data due to disk failure
> is pretty remote (but that likely means that the database pieces will
> likely be raw access, so doing a "down it and do a filesystem backup"
> will likely be impossible. We use Vertias Netbackup to backup dbspaces
> and logical logs for Informix so it's expected long term that we will
> do the same with Oracle. Short term I will likely do log and database
> backups to disk first because our netbackup san network of dlt tape
> libraries is pretty touchy.
>
> The actual space being used will be relatively small at first, but it
> will grow quickly. On one end of the pipe is Informix, and the other
> SAP. It will be interesting how this all works. I may be insane, but
> I'm looking forward to learning oracle in earnest because it and DB/2
> are the only two major databases system that I have not "experienced"
> yet. There are no blobs or multidimensional monsters in the design
> that I have seen yet, so I won't have to focus any attention there.
>
> It's a shame that system requirements are so insane, I have not been
> able to find a place to install a "play" instance for me to experiment
> with yet. I'm hopeing to get an ODBC link up to it as well so I can
> talk to it using "familar" interfaces as well.
>
> From my reading so far, My gut is telling me that if I can get all the
> core oracle terminology/concepts babble down, I might have half a
> success of keeping this thing alive on life support (for the time
> being.) Clearly I won't be winning any oracle trivia contests. Alot
> will also depend on how well behaved the programs that the outsourcer
> provides will be as well.
>
> Wish me luck,
>
> - MW
>

Well, I wish you God Speed. But please *do* get a backup and recovery handbook. A simple copy of the datafiles is *useless* if the database is open.
Either shutdown the db and backup everything cold, or read and learn hot backup techniques.
Do it quickly, before you worry about tuning, configuration, oracle trivia or anything else.

Good luck!

Paul Received on Tue May 14 2002 - 17:20:27 CDT