Re: Concepts and DBA Administration manuals

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003 20:57:20 +0100, "Paul Brewer" <paul_at_paul.brewers.org.uk> wrote:

>"Brock Keckritz" <bkeckritz_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:b6sqfq$hrq$1_at_ns2.htc.net...
>> ah - tahiti - I'm on my way
>>
>Brock,
>
>For this suggestion, I may come in for some criticism from other posters
>here.
>
>The Concepts manual is thorough, comprehensive, well-written, useful and
>good reading. But you might find it somewhat slow going as a 'get you
>started guide'. It might be easier to get the feel of things by visiting
>your local bookstore first.

Well, the first link on the 9.2 documentation page is for "Getting Started":

http://otn.oracle.com/pls/db92/db92.getting_started?remark=homepage

It mentions the Concepts book, but also several other more or less extensive places to start, such as "Duties of a Database Administrator" which will lead you into the day-to-day things like backup and recovery, or the installation docs and release notes for someone truly starting from ground zero.

If I were advising someone to go read Concepts, I'd tailor the advice based on the person. A regular admin, I'd suggest read some of the later chapters first, schema objects and such like. Someone coming from some other product, I might direct to the sections about things that they might find different (locking being a good example), or features that they might not be familiar with at all (say for someone coming from one of the open-source databases).

I'm interested to hear other people's opinions about the Concepts book, which parts are or aren't valuable to them, and why.

John

--
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