Re: Sysadmin trying to learn Oracle...help!

tonij67_at_hotmail.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been a sys admin for a while now, going on 8 years. I support
> systems with various versions of Oracle running on Solaris. I have
> always threatend to actually learn something about Oracle and I am
> finally beggining that journey.
>
> And it sure is humbling!
>
> I have a couple books here, one of them is a Study Guide for Oracle 8i
> and one is O'Reillys "Oracle SQL*Plus".
>
> While both have a lot of information, I am having a hard time even
> getting started...think I need an "Oracle for Dummies" or something. A
> coworker set up a database for me that I believe is fairly simple, it
> loads in data from a text file that is recording disk space usage over
> multiple systems for trending purposes. I have full access to this
> database, i.e. I can connect to it and see a shiny SQL> prompt but I
> am at a loss as to where to go from here.
>
> Are there any decent resources that can get me going in the right
> direction? Out of these two books I have, they cover a lot of high end
> stuff but a lot of it seems to assume that I already know what I am
> doing; but I dont! For now I would be happy to see what sort of
> tables exist in this database, what they are called, i.e. but all of
> the examples I find assume I already know that. One example I found is
> the "describe" command. Looks handy at first, but the examples in the
> book say to do something like this:
>
> DESCRIBE <argument>
>
> How can I find out what <argument> possibilities are? Is there some
> sort of overview command that will help me fill in the blanks here?
>
> TIA,
As previously suggested tahiti.oracle.com is the best single source for syntax in all of its verbosity.

For working demos of the technology go to www.psoug.org and click on Morgan's Library.

the PSOUG site also has a tab labeled RESOURCES with links to many of the best Oracle sites on the web. I also highly recommend books by Tom Kyte and Jonathan Lewis.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)